Running a small fleet: trips, fuel and the argument about the odometer

A small fleet runs on two units, and most software models one of them badly. The vehicle is the unit of cost — fuel, tyres, parts, the days it stands — and the trip is the unit of work: a load that left one gate, arrived at another, and somebody signed for it. An invoice is neither, so a month can close with revenue and no answer to whether it was earned.

Which two units does a fleet actually run on?

The trip and the vehicle, kept apart, and neither stored as a note inside the other.

A trip is a record when it carries four things: a start, an end, a load and a document. The start is a time and an odometer reading taken before the vehicle leaves the yard; the end is the same two at the other gate, plus what was actually handed over, which is not always what was loaded. The load is what everybody remembers and nobody writes: pallets, weight, a description the customer would recognise two months later.

The vehicle is a cost account that accumulates distance — litres, tyres, repairs, the weeks it did not move. It knows nothing about customers, and when it appears only as a word on an invoice line, that account does not exist.

What does litres against kilometres catch?

Theft and waste at once, without accusing anyone, because the ratio belongs to the vehicle rather than to a person.

The comparison is the vehicle against its own history: a loaded truck on a mountain road and an empty van in town share no number, and a manufacturer's figure is a laboratory. What you watch is movement: a ratio that jumps in a week goes to the vehicle first — a tyre, a leak, a heavier load — and to the driver only when the vehicle has no answer.

The discipline is in the visibility, not the arithmetic: one page, every vehicle, litres, distance, ratio, this week and last, read by the owner and the drivers together. Theft survives secrecy; it does not survive a number four people can see and one has to explain. Publishing it in one shape is what the W3C's data on the web best practices are for: the value is comparability.

Why does maintenance belong on the odometer?

Because a vehicle wears with distance, not with the calendar. A truck doing 400 km a week and one doing 4,000 share a service schedule and nothing else: the first is serviced four times too often, the second breaks between services.

So the interval hangs off the odometer — oil at one distance, filters at another, tyres measured rather than dated — with a tolerance for a reading that arrives late because the vehicle was on the road. A schedule that cannot say "late by 800 km" is ignored once and then abandoned.

The calendar still keeps what rots instead of wearing — a battery, a seal. And parts on the same odometer turn "that one is expensive" into "two clutches in 90,000 km", a conversation with a mechanic rather than an opinion at month end.

What does paying per trip change?

What the driver does next, predictably. A per-trip rate is easy to explain, and it makes a driver prefer many short trips to one long one, hesitate over a load that takes two days, and treat fuel as somebody else's cost. A rate per kilometre fixes the first two, not the third. A salary with one component he controls — the fuel ratio of his own vehicle, or arrivals that match the note — pays for the behaviour you want, and is harder to explain to a man paid the other way.

Whichever you choose, the system has to pay it: if the rate is per trip the trip must be countable, or payroll runs on the driver's notebook; if the component is fuel, the ratio reaches him weekly.

Record	What it holds	The question it answers
Trip	start, end, load, signed note	what moved, and who took it
Vehicle	litres, kilometres, parts	what a kilometre costs
Driver	trips, hours, pay basis	what the week paid for

What has to be true at the door when the customer signs?

The note has to exist, carry your reference, and be read before it is signed.

It carries five things: your trip number, the arrival time, what was delivered in the receiver's words, the condition it arrived in, and the signature of whoever took it. A short delivery is written there, not reported later by phone: the note is the only document still in existence when the disagreement starts.

Where the note comes from the system that opened the trip, readings, load and signature sit in one record, and the question six weeks later is answered by opening it. A carbon pad in the cab keeps the trip twice, and the versions disagree exactly when money is discussed. If a customer's system has to read the note rather than a person, UBL 2.1 defines a waybill and a transport status for that handover.

In what order do you build this?

1. Cost one vehicle for one week by hand — fuel, trips, kilometres. That figure is the baseline.
2. Take an odometer reading at the start and the end of every trip, photographed where the driver has a phone.
3. Give the trip a number, and make the delivery note carry it.
4. Record fuel per vehicle per fill with the reading at the pump: litres without a distance are a receipt.
5. Move the maintenance intervals onto distance, and write the tolerance down.
6. Show the weekly ratio to the drivers before attaching any consequence to it.
7. Decide the pay basis last, once the trip is countable.

Where this goes wrong

• The odometer is typed at the end of the week, from memory. Every distance becomes an estimate, and the ratio measures the estimator.
• Fuel is recorded as an amount, not litres. Money moves with price; only litres compare with distance.
• The trip is opened when the invoice is written, so the load, the delay and the short delivery vanish: the record describes billing, not work.
• Maintenance is a calendar reminder nobody owns. It fires on a date, the vehicle is elsewhere, and the item is marked done.
• The note is written by the customer, in their reference and wording, with no record of what left your yard.

What this does not cover

It does not price a trip, and says nothing about insurance, permits or what a haulage contract should contain; that belongs to a lawyer and to your market. It assumes the vehicle is yours to cost: a subcontracted truck arrives with a supplier invoice and a different problem. And it assumes a dozen vehicles or more; below that a notebook and a weekly fuel sheet do the job.

We build fleet systems where the trip is the record and the vehicle is the cost account — readings, litres, intervals and the signed note in one place, on the phone the driver already carries.