It is a fact that tracking your numbers will help you improve. When people start tracking their fuel even without doing anything else their fuel mileage often improves. They actually start driving differently. The same can go with tracking your loads including all deadhead miles. At the first of the year write down your mileage and then at the end of the year write down that mileage. Using your income for the year and miles driven, you will be able to know how much you made for all miles driven.That can be a wakeup call.
There are free programs on the internet that can be used. Google has a good one that is free. What I like about this program is that it is cloud-based, and I can quickly add or see my numbers using my phone, my tablet, or my computer.
There are lots of tutorials about how to use the spreadsheets or “sheets” as they are called in Google. Google also has several free programs that can be used besides sheets.
The sheet can be as simple or as complicated as you want it. For my necessary information, I want the agent code, the load pay, the date the load was picked up, the city where we picked up, delivery date, the city where we unloaded, loaded miles, and deadhead miles. I also keep some other numbers in there, but that is my own preference.
My starting mileage I post on the first day of the year as I will also post the mileage at the end of the year. When I want to know how much we have made per mile, I want all miles. Once I have established my starting mileage, I build from there. When I get the first load of the year and have delivered it, I enter the mileage while I am at the receiver or consignee. That is my ending mileage for the load. I will have two numbers at this point. One is for what the load paid and the mileage we were told it would be. In our situation, we are only told loaded miles. My next number will be for all of the miles on that trip, and that is the number that I pay the most attention to.
At the end of the year, it is easy to total up the load pay column and divide by total miles driven to know the average rate for all miles. There are lots of tricks that can be used in sheets to keep track of numbers.
By the end of 2020, you will be surprised at all of the information you can gain with not that much effort.