Per-lorry profit & loss V. Govardhan, Chartered Accountant

The GPS vendor tells you where your lorry is.
This tells you what it earned.

One page a month, per lorry. What it earned, what it cost, what it left you, and the return on the money you have tied up in it. Owned lorries and lorries you hire in, side by side.

Built and read by a chartered accountant. It is an operating statement for running a fleet — not a second set of books.

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The question nobody can answer

Should the next lorry be bought, or hired in?

Your books tell you what the business made. They do not tell you which lorry made it, or what your own money earned while it did. On rupees alone the answer looks obvious. On return it usually is not.

One month, five lorriesLorriesProfitYour capitalReturn
Your own lorries31,03,225 44,14,3012.0%
Hired in per trip21,00,546 5,11,24537.1%
Almost the same money, on a ninth of the capital. Both are worth having — but only one of them tells you where the next rupee should go.
The fleet dashboard: five lorries with trips, kilometres, mileage, earnings, profit per kilometre, capital employed and monthly return.
Every lorry, ranked. The one losing money is not hidden at the bottom of a spreadsheet — it is the first thing the page says.
What a month shows up

The leaks are found by arithmetic, not by suspicion

Nothing here is an opinion about anybody. Each finding is a figure with the rows behind it, ranked by what it costs you in a year.

Mileage against its own baseline

Not against the other lorries — against what this one normally does. A 4.7% gap on one lorry was 123 extra litres, ₹11,596 in the month, ₹1.4 lakh a year.

Detention never claimed

Trips that waited two days or more and were never billed for it, valued at the rate the fleet actually realises — not a rate from a rulebook.

Short payments with no reason

Money that came in below what was billed. Explained shortfalls are a decision; the unexplained ones are the bucket worth emptying.

Kilometres nobody paid for

Odometer span against billed trip kilometres. The running between one delivery and the next load appears in no book anywhere else.

Paid the lorry owner before the customer paid you

On hired trips, the gap between the two dates is your working capital. Settling closer to collection frees it, and the report prices it.

Costs with nothing behind them

What share of a month's spending has a bill you could actually produce. On one fleet: ₹74,439 of ₹8.51 lakh had neither a scan nor a bill claimed.

What one month cannot say

A lorry rarely fails. It slides.

Any month tells you which lorry lost money. Three months tell you which one is going wrong, and roughly when it started — which is the difference between a repair and a write-off.

Every figure, month by month

Profit, rupees per kilometre and mileage, drawn against each lorry's own history. A month a lorry did not run is a gap in the line, never a zero — a zero would show a collapse that did not happen.

Findings a single month cannot make

One lorry's mileage fell 3.54 to 3.18 km/l across three months against a 3.85 baseline: 276 extra litres, ₹25,989 in the month, ₹3.1 lakh a year. A slide that steady is the engine, the driver, or the fuel going somewhere else.

Nothing manufactured to fill the space

A run of three falling numbers is easy to find and usually means nothing. A finding has to be worth at least a hundredth of what that lorry earned that month, or it is not shown at all.

One lorry month by month: the findings it raised, then profit, profit per kilometre and mileage drawn against its own baseline across three months.
The same lorry across three months. The findings at the top are the ones no single month could have made.
What you are handed

One printed page per lorry, per month

Dense, plain and printable — the way a chartered accountant sets out a statement, not the way software shows a dashboard. Four cost layers, a cash reconciliation, per-kilometre working, and the method stated at the foot so every figure can be argued with.

A one-page lorry statement: what it earned, trip costs, lorry costs, office and finance, the profit, a cash-terms reconciliation, per-kilometre figures and the month's findings.
Every rupee traces to a trip sheet, a bunk slip or a garage bill. Where a figure has no document behind it, the page says so rather than treating it as nil.
How it starts

Bring three months of papers. The first statement is free.

  1. Three months of trip sheets and diesel bills, for five lorries Whatever form they are in — a register, a diary, WhatsApp photographs. No software of yours needs to change.
  2. You get one page per lorry per month, and a fleet comparison Your own numbers, not a demonstration. Read it, argue with it, check it against what you already believe.
  3. If it tells you something you did not know, we carry on Then it becomes monthly, your office enters the trips, and the statement arrives without anybody being asked for papers again.
Email V. Govardhan