What is a Profitability Report?

Are your operations generating profit? Or are they falling short because of inefficient lanes or maintenance costs? A profitability report is a tool that brings clarity to the complex world of trucking, which helps you understand exactly where your money is coming from and where it’s going.

At its most basic core, a trucking company profit margin report breaks down key financial metrics, such as:

• Revenue: The total income your business generates, including freight charges, accessorial fees, and fuel surcharges.
• Operating Costs: Day-to-day expenses like fuel, driver wages, maintenance, and tolls. Also known as cost of goods.
• Fixed Costs: Regular overhead like truck leases and insurance.
• Net Profit: The bottom line – what’s left after all expenses are subtracted from revenue.

Types of Trucking Company Profit Margin Reports

Trucking businesses often use different types of profit margin reports depending on their goals. Here are a few examples:

• Truck profitability: Track revenue and costs associated with each vehicle. You can use a report like this to identify which trucks are profitable and where you might be losing money due to maintenance costs or fuel consumption.
• Lane profitability: Track revenue and costs associated with each lane or route. This report helps you pinpoint which routes are the most efficient and where you might need to make adjustments.
• Driver profitability: Analyze the performance of each driver by looking at metrics such as miles driven and fuel efficiency. Factor in driver wages to assess the profitability per driver. Can wages be adjusted?
• Customer profitability: Assess revenue and profitability tied to specific customers, shippers, or brokers. Highlight which ones are most valuable to your business. You can use these insights to re-negotiate rates or prioritize certain contracts or partnerships.
• Mileage profitability: Determine a profit per mile through the lens of trucks, drivers, or customers.

These insights aren’t just nice to have – they’re essential. A well-prepared trucking company profitability report helps you spot opportunities, cut unnecessary costs, and grow your business! Frontline Q7 trucking accounting software makes creating these reports easier than ever, giving you the financial visibility you need to stay ahead.

3 Steps to Create a Trucking Company Profit Margin Report

The following 3 steps outline how you can collect your data, organize it, then calculate your profitability.

1. Gather Your Data

In the trucking industry, profitability reports can take different forms depending on what aspect you want to analyze. Before you start, decide what type of report you need. With that in mind, you’re ready to start gathering data. Depending on the combination of data you want to see, that might include:

• Lanes or routes
• Revenue per load, truck, lane, driver, or customer.
• Expenses per load, truck, lane, driver or customer.

It’s best to pick a stable date range for each of these factors as you go. With Frontline Q7 trucking accounting software, gathering this data is lightning fast. Information is automatically consolidated from dispatch, invoicing, driver pay, maintenance, and other costs.

2. Organize Your Data

Once the data is gathered, the next step is to organize it in a way that’s clear and actionable.

• Categorize income and expenses:
  • Separate income into categories like freight charges, fuel surcharge, and accessorial charges.
  • Separate expenses into categories like fuel, driver wages, maintenance, tolls and insurance.
  • Tag each category’s total to specific trucks, loads, lanes, drivers, or customers so you can streamline analysis later. See Example of Trucking Company Profit Margin Report if you need inspiration.
• Centralize your data:
  • Instead of juggling spreadsheets, input everything into trucking software.
  • Software like Frontline Q7 automatically organizes your data, so it’s easy to pull up reports at the click of a button or look for the information you need.
• Keep your data clean:
  • Make sure entries are accurate and consistent so you’re not reporting on errors.
  • Keep your data up to date so your profitability reports reflect the latest activity.

Organizing your data upfront ensures that your trucking profitability reports are accurate, reliable, and easy to interpret. The less time you spend sorting numbers, the more time you have to focus on making strategic decisions.

3. Calculate Profitability

Now comes the moment of truth: determining how well your trucking business is performing financially. You’ll want to get a couple of metrics for each combination of data points (load, truck, lane, customer, etc.).

Calculate net profit.

Next, analyze profit margins as a percentage. Remember, you might want to calculate this for each data point.

Use these totals to identify areas where you can cut costs, negotiate better rates, or adjust your trucking business operations. For example, if a specific lane shows low profitability, you can optimize the route or adjust pricing.

That feels like a lot! With Frontline Q7, these calculations occur for several data points automatically. Q7 generates detailed trucking company profitability reports. View your data in graphs or charts, expand or contract the detail, and utilize different ranges of dates instantly.

Example of Trucking Business Profit Margin Report

In Frontline Q7, we ran a report for a specific period of time for our tractors data point. This report lets you customize which categories you want to include and for which type of equipment you want to see. In this case, we ran it for company owned vehicles with company drivers only.

For each tractor, we can see a breakdown per load. Expenses that aren’t associated with a load are grouped at the top. Since this is a financial report, we see main categories only. If we need to see a breakdown of a sub-category, we can click into the load or run a separate report with matching parameters.

There are several other reports available that combine data points and let you customize the categories and sub-categories you want to include.

Pro Tip for Boosting Trucking Business Profitability

Creating a profitability report is powerful, but the real value comes in using those insights to make your trucking business more profitable. By leveraging Frontline Q7’s powerful reporting tools, you can make smarter business decisions and build a more profitable trucking operation. If you’re interested in running a variety of profit reports on demand, reach out to use for a reporting demonstration today!