This article will show you everything you should include in a trucking expenses spreadsheet and provide you with a free template to download. The template is quite easy to use, so feel free to just download the template and get cracking.
Table of Contents
Download the Free Trucking Expenses Spreadsheet
What Are the Biggest Trucking Expenses to Include in an Expenses Spreadsheet
Knowing where your cash goes in and out of your business is totally up to you. However, truckers should be aware of some of the most critical trucking expenses to run a successful business. Look to classify all your expenditures into two categories. These include some fixed and variable costs. You should look to add these to your trucking business expenses spreadsheet.
The fixed costs are costs that you will have whether you’re actively running the trucking business or your trucks stay idle in the parking lot. These costs may remain the same but change based on inflation.
The variable costs include the costs incurred when your trucks are being driven. These costs will increase as the miles driven increase.
The fixed expenses in your spreadsheet can include vehicle payments, permit costs, insurance, licensing fees, physical damages, and other miscellaneous expenses. The variable expenses can include costs like fuel, vehicle maintenance, tolls, and taxes. Feel free to add additional expenses to your owner-operator trucking expenses spreadsheet, but this can be a great place to start.
How Can You Make Your Trucking Business More Efficient
Not all trucking businesses are being run as they should, as many managers don’t keep the proper records efficiently. Here are some things you can do to make your trucking business more efficient.
Have a Business Plan
Your business plan is your roadmap to running not only a successful but also an efficient trucking business. It doesn’t matter if your business plan covers the next few months or the upcoming years. What matters is that you need to have one. Here, you document if you need new equipment, the number of drivers you are managing, and the trucking equipment you need.
Create a Budget
You have the risk of running a successful business to the ground if you don’t keep funds to a budget. There should always be some money left aside in this budget for unforeseen expenses in the future. You can easily do this using an expense tracking spreadsheet.
Trucking industry professionals frequently perform repairs and maintenance. Save money to be ready for these risks. You won’t have to worry when several trucks require repairs if you have cash for unforeseen expenses.
Plan and Optimize Routes
You can improve the overall efficiency of your business and keep a strong profit margin by planning and optimizing the trucking routes. Numerous aspects must be considered when determining the best route for your drivers. Consider planned rest stops throughout the journey, such as overnight stays and driving breaks.
Remember that you need more than just planning a specific route and hoping your driver arrives by the anticipated arrival time. The driver must adhere to a crucial schedule and delivery period for delivery vehicles, especially those hauling time-sensitive materials.
Map services like Google Maps can be great for casual family trips, but they aren’t best suited for navigating truck routes. You will need to add the stops manually, and the maximum amount of stops you can add to Google Maps is ten.
Know and Track Your Expenses
You can keep your business from failing if you know your business expenses. You can determine how much it will cost to operate your business by keeping track of expenses like salary, fuel, office costs, truck upkeep, and repairs. Additionally, you can determine whether your business is profitable by knowing how much money you invest in it.
Many business owners like to keep track of all of their costs using an owner-operator expense spreadsheet. These can easily be created, or you can find a free truck driver expense spreadsheet online.
Using a trucking company expense sheet can give you some of these benefits:
- Automation: You need to do a lot of calculations requiring you to use complex formulas. Using a trucker expense spreadsheet will allow you to add these formulas that will automatically perform various calculations, saving you a lot of time and effort.
- Prevents Errors: Doing calculations manually can not only be time-consuming but can also introduce errors, leading to more data errors.
- Keeps Data Organised: When you use a spreadsheet template to track your business expenses (like a rental property spreadsheet, for example), you add all the data into one spreadsheet, meaning that the data is stored safely on one file. This allows you to organize the data easily. Google Sheets allows you to create multiple spreadsheets in one file, which means you can keep the data for every year in a single spreadsheet.
Related Reading: Free Google Sheets Ledger Template
How to Create a Trucking Expense Spreadsheet
Now that we know what goes into making a spreadsheet for truckers, let’s take a look at the steps you need to follow to create a free owner-operator expense spreadsheet:
- The first thing we will do when creating our free trucking expenses spreadsheet is add a label. To add our label, we merge cells by clicking on Format in the top bar and then on Merge cells. With the cells merged, we make the Font size bigger and change the Fill color of the cells. Feel free to experiment using multiple methods to do this.
- Now, add the data to the spreadsheet. For this template, we added the fixed trucking expenses as well as the variable expenses. We also aim to utilize formulas to calculate the totals and determine the profit.
- You may have noticed by now that the spreadsheet looks bland. Â We will add some visual elements to make sure the spreadsheet is easy to work on. The boxes have a thick border, and the cells with formulas are indicated by a different color, whereas the ones that require input from a user are indicated by another.
- To ensure the spreadsheet works and is automated properly, we will use formulas. The SUM formula is used in the screenshot to find the total expenses per year for the trucking business. Using formulas will automate most of the spreadsheet, meaning you won’t have to manually write the values.
This was a general outline of how you can create a trucking expenses template. Feel free to make changes to the steps we mentioned and create your own free trucking spreadsheet templates.
Related Reading: Free Google Sheets Profit and Loss Template
Frequently Asked Questions
How Do You Calculate Trucking Cost per Mile?
Divide your monthly expenses by the miles you traveled to determine the cost per mile. For instance, if you spent $7,000 and traveled 20,000 miles, then the cost per mile would be $0.35. Similarly, if you calculate the miles per dollar, you can do this by dividing the miles traveled by the dollars spent. For example, if you traveled 10,000 miles and spent $4,000, then the miles per dollar value is 2.5.
What Is the Easiest Way to Keep Track of Expenses?
The easiest (and free) method of keeping track of expenses is by creating a spreadsheet. The best part about creating a spreadsheet is that it is free and customizable. If you use spreadsheet software like Google Sheets, you can also share the spreadsheet, meaning that you can collaborate on the same spreadsheet in real-time by sharing it with your employees or bosses.
Wrapping Up the Trucking Expenses Spreadsheet Guide
Although we didn’t dive too deep into the ins and outs of how our free trucking expenses spreadsheet template works, you should just be able to download and use it. If you’d like to know more about the formulas we used, check out the related content below.
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