Most transporters know how much they earn per trip. Far fewer know how much each trip actually costs. The money usually leaks in places that never show up on a single invoice:

• Fuel variance: fuel issued versus fuel the route should have used.
• Idle trucks: days a truck waits for cargo, paperwork or a driver.
• Driver compliance: licence expiry and hours of service, where one missed check can park a truck or trigger a fine.
• Maintenance surprises: repairs that were never linked back to the trips that caused them.
• Trip profitability: revenue minus fuel, allowances, tolls, repairs and driver cost, per trip and per truck.

In a Transport Management setup on Odoo, a trip becomes the centre of the record. The truck, driver (kept as a normal employee record), fuel, expenses and customer invoice all attach to the same trip, so you can see profit per trip, per truck and per customer without rebuilding it in a spreadsheet at month end.

Question for the community: How do you track cost per trip today: spreadsheets, paper trip sheets, or a system? And which cost is hardest to capture accurately: fuel, driver allowances or maintenance?

Share your setup or your biggest headache below and we will walk through how to handle it in Odoo.