Profit per truck: what each plumbing van really earns

If you run more than one van, the most useful number in your business is not what the company made. It is what each truck made.

Company totals average everything together. A strong truck and a weak one produce a middling result that looks acceptable, and nothing in your books tells you that one of them has been losing money since spring.

What a truck actually costs to run

Before you can say what a van earns, you have to know what it costs. Four parts, and most owners undercount at least two.

The tech. Not his hourly rate — his loaded cost. Wage plus payroll taxes, workers compensation (which in plumbing is not cheap), and any benefits. A tech on $28 an hour typically costs somewhere close to $37 once all of that is on. Every calculation that uses $28 is wrong on the largest line.

The vehicle. Payment or depreciation, fuel, insurance, maintenance, tyres, registration. Fuel is the one people track; the rest quietly add up to more.

Stock on board. The material sitting in the van is money you have spent and not yet recovered. It also walks, and the shrinkage is real.

A share of overhead. Dispatch, the office, the phone system, software. If you run three trucks, each carries roughly a third — adjusted if one is on bigger work.

What a truck brings in

Revenue coded to the truck, or to the tech who drives it. This is the part that usually needs setting up, because most plumbing books code revenue to the company and stop.

Every invoice needs the tech or vehicle attached. If your field software already does that, it is a matter of getting it to flow through to the books. If it does not, it is a habit change worth making.

Then split emergency from scheduled

Once you have per-truck figures, the next split is the one that explains them.

Emergency and after-hours work prices higher and costs more — overtime, disruption, and a tech who is less productive the following day. Scheduled work prices lower and runs efficiently.

A truck that looks weak may simply be the one running most of the scheduled work while another gets the call-outs. Without the split you would conclude you have a weak tech, and act on it.

What owners typically find

Three patterns come up repeatedly.

The gap between best and worst is wide. Usually much wider than expected. It is rarely about effort — it is about the mix of work each truck receives, which is a dispatch decision, not a personnel one.

Drive time is eating a truck. One van covering the outer edge of the service area spends noticeably more of the day driving. Same tech, same rates, less billable time.

The newest truck looks bad and is not. A new vehicle carries the heaviest payment while the tech is still coming up to speed. Worth measuring separately from the settled trucks so you do not act on a temporary picture.

What to do with the answer

The point is not to rank your techs. It is to fix the input.

If one truck is short on billable hours, look at routing before performance. If one carries all the emergency work, price accordingly and rotate it. If a service area consistently costs more to reach than it returns, that is a territory decision — and the numbers make it an easy one instead of a guess.

Most owners we work with make one dispatch or territory change within the first two months of having this visible, and it is generally the change they had been putting off for a year.

Related

• Job costing for contractors
• Why jobs that look profitable still lose you money
• Plumbing bookkeeping services