Trip Profitability Software That Prices the Next Load Properly
A fleet can be busy, full and quietly losing money on half its lanes. KO Fleetz assembles a profit and loss for every run from the rate on the order and the cost the trip genuinely generated, then rolls it up by corridor, customer and vehicle. Rate talks stop being a guess about last year plus inflation.
Everything looks profitable until you divide it up
The month closes in the black, so the operation is assumed to be healthy. That is the whole analysis in a great many fleets, because the books are kept by cost head — fuel, wages, tyres, workshop, insurance — and a cost head cannot tell you which customer it was spent serving. Profit exists at the company level and nowhere below it.
So when an account asks for a rate, the answer is what was charged last year with something added for inflation. Nobody can say what that corridor costs to run, because the cost of running it has never been assembled in one place. The customer who negotiates hardest ends up with the keenest rate, which is precisely backwards: the account consuming most of your capacity ought to be paying more, not less.
The loss-making runs hide inside the profitable ones. A job that returns empty across two hundred kilometres, waits four hours at a dock and pays tolls in both directions can be comfortably underwater while the depot it belongs to looks fine. It survives for years because nobody costs a trip. They cost a month, and a month is large enough to swallow anything.
Assemble the run's own profit and loss
Revenue arrives from the rate on the order, the contract line or the job card. From there KO Fleetz builds the cost out of what the trip genuinely did: litres burned on its own legs, driver hours booked against it, tolls and roadside spend logged to it, detention it sat through, and a share of the standing cost the vehicle carries whether or not it turns a wheel.
That yields a margin per run, and a margin per run aggregates in the directions a commercial conversation actually takes. By lane, so you know which corridors earn their keep. By customer, so the account sending short-notice work into long waits stops being subsidised by the one that books properly. By vehicle, so an asset held for a single contract is judged on what it returns.
What the module will not do is tell you a run lost money because a driver was slow. Attribution stops where the data stops: the cost lines and where they landed. It is also not your accounting system. The ledger remains the source of truth for the books; this is the operational view finance reconciles against, and the two will differ at the edges because they answer different questions.
Capabilities
What KO Fleetz trip profitability gives your team
Revenue attached to the order
The agreed rate, contract line or customer tariff sits on the trip record itself, so income and expenditure finally occupy the same row.
Assembled cost build-up
KO Fleetz stacks fuel, hours, tolls, roadside spend, detention and allocated standing cost into one figure per run, with each line traceable back to its source.
Margin by corridor
Lanes are ranked on what they return per run and per kilometre, which is the number you want in hand before a rate comes up for renewal.
Margin by account
Customers are judged on the full cost of serving them, including the waiting, the empty return and the work that arrives at short notice.
Loss-making run flags
KO Fleetz surfaces trips closing below margin with their cost lines exposed, so the cause is legible instead of being averaged away by the month.
Quoted rate against actual
What a lane was priced at, shown beside what every run on it has cost since the rate was agreed, including the ones nobody mentioned.
Explicit fixed-cost rule
Depreciation, insurance and standing costs spread onto trips by a rule you choose, and the rule is printed next to the number it produced.
Contribution per vehicle
Each asset is measured on the margin it produced rather than on a utilisation percentage, which counts movement and says nothing about money.
How it works
How KO Fleetz does it
Step 1: Attach the rate to the trip
Revenue arrives from your order book, contract or dispatch feed and sits on the trip. A run without a rate is reported as unpriced rather than as free.
Step 2: Collect the costs the run caused
Fuel from the tank ledger, hours from the shift, expenses from the road, tolls from the corridor driven. Every line keeps a link to where it came from.
Step 3: Choose the fixed-cost rule
Standing costs are allocated per kilometre, per day or per trip. The choice is explicit, because nobody trusts a figure whose derivation is hidden.
Step 4: Read it the way you sell
Margin rolls up by corridor, customer, contract, vehicle class and depot — the same shapes a commercial review already uses.
Outcomes
What changes
- Margin assembled per run, not per month
- Trip-level
- Lanes ranked on what they actually return
- By corridor
- Every cost line keeps a link to its source
- Traceable
- Numbers you can take into a pricing meeting
- Rate-ready
Frequently asked questions
No, and running them together is what stops most fleets seeing either clearly. Trip expense management is a capture and control problem: money leaves your hands on the road and you need it recorded, evidenced and settled. This module is an analysis problem: it asks whether the revenue on a run exceeded everything the run consumed. Expenses are one input here, alongside fuel, hours and standing cost. You can have immaculate expense control and still have no idea which lane loses money.
Wherever your rates already live. Most fleets keep them in a spreadsheet of contract lines, an order system, or a customer tariff stable enough to key in once and maintain. A rate card mapped to lanes and vehicle classes gets you most of the way, and per-order rates can be imported or entered at dispatch. A trip whose rate cannot be established is shown as unpriced rather than assumed to be zero, so gaps in your revenue data stay visible instead of quietly deflating every average.
There is no universally correct answer, which is exactly why the rule is a setting rather than a hidden assumption. Per-kilometre allocation suits long-haul work where distance drives everything. Per-day suits fleets whose constraint is vehicle and driver availability rather than distance. Per-trip suits high-frequency short work. The thing that reliably misleads is picking a rule, forgetting it, then arguing about the output. The rule appears alongside the figure so the argument stays about the business.
It applies, but the reading changes. Under a monthly or dedicated-fleet contract, revenue is apportioned across the runs performed within it, so an individual trip's margin becomes a share rather than a discrete fact. That is still useful: it tells you what the contract costs you to serve, and whether the volume you agreed to carry is the volume actually moving. What it cannot do is price one run in isolation, and the module says so rather than presenting an apportioned figure as a measured one.
Partly, and the limit is worth stating bluntly. If your fleet moves your own goods there is no rate, so there is no margin to compute. What remains is the cost half, which is genuinely valuable: cost per delivery, cost per case, cost per store visit, cost by lane. Some fleets set an internal transfer rate or benchmark against third-party haulage on the same corridor, which restores a comparison. Without one of those, treat this as trip costing and read the profitability framing as aspirational.
It does not, and any vendor claiming otherwise should be asked how they handle a credit note. Your ledger stays the record for statutory accounts, tax and audit. KO Fleetz is the operational view built from what vehicles and drivers actually did, available while the work is fresh rather than after a close. The two will disagree at the margins over accruals, timing and allocation, and that is expected. The point is to make an operational decision on Tuesday, not to restate the accounts.
Find out which lanes actually earn
Pick three corridors and one month of runs, and KO Fleetz will build the cost side and show you where the margin really sits.