Most small fleet owners know their monthly diesel bill and their EMI. Fewer know which trips made money. A monthly total hides the loss-making lanes behind the good ones. Working trip by trip shows them.
Start with a trip sheet
For every trip, write down:
- date, vehicle, driver, origin, destination and the LR number;
- loaded kilometres and empty kilometres, separately;
- freight agreed, and how much has been received;
- diesel in litres and in rupees;
- tolls, driver bhatta, loading and unloading, repairs on the road, commission and anything else;
- the advance given to the driver.
Three numbers to take from it
1. Trip contribution
Freight less everything spent because of the trip: diesel, tolls, bhatta, loading, commission. This is what the trip contributes towards the costs you pay anyway.
2. Fixed cost per kilometre
Add up a month of EMI, insurance, road tax and permits, fixed salaries and parking. Divide by the kilometres the truck usually runs in a month. A truck with ₹1,44,000 of fixed costs running 8,000 km has a fixed cost of ₹18 per km. If it runs only 6,000 km, the same costs come to ₹24 per km — utilisation changes everything.
3. Net trip profit
Contribution less (fixed cost per km × total kilometres of the trip, including empty ones).
Empty kilometres are part of the trip
If the truck drove 80 km empty to reach the loading point, those 80 km burned diesel and wore tyres for this load. Count them. A lane that looks fine on loaded kilometres can turn negative once the empty leg is included.
Contribution positive, profit negative
This is the most useful case to recognise. The trip covered its own diesel and tolls and paid something towards the EMI, but not its full share. The fix is rarely to refuse the lane. It is to find a return load, cut waiting time so the truck runs more kilometres in the month, or reprice.
Watch diesel per kilometre, per vehicle
Diesel is the largest single cost. Litres filled divided into kilometres run gives each vehicle’s average. A truck whose average drops against its own history needs a look — at the vehicle, the route or the fuel slips.
Keep it up without extra work
A notebook or a spreadsheet does the job if it is filled in for every trip. The trip cost calculator runs these sums before you accept a load, and the trip ledger in a free CargoForge account keeps them for each trip you actually run.