Loads and Revenue

You run a load from Laredo to Chicago, gross $3,800, and hand 12% to the carrier. You had 180 deadhead miles getting into Laredo from the prior delivery in San Antonio. You cleared $3,344 net. That works out to $2.47 per loaded mile. You do this five times in two weeks, and on the sixth load you agree to a spot rate that feels competitive — but you cannot actually evaluate it because you have no systematic record of what you've been clearing. You're negotiating blind.

Why Load Revenue Looks Better Than It Is

The loaded mile rate is the number brokers quote and the number you instinctively compare. It is also the number most likely to mislead you. Pay Per Loaded Mile in this template is Net to Truck divided by Loaded Miles — Delivery ODO minus Pick Up ODO. That is the rate on the freight distance. Rate for All Miles — Net to Truck divided by Total Miles, where Total Miles is Delivery ODO minus Last Empty ODO — includes the deadhead.

Those two numbers can diverge significantly. A load that pays $2.80 per loaded mile with 200 miles of deadhead, on a 400-mile haul, is $2.80 per loaded mile and roughly $1.87 per total mile. A $2.40 per loaded mile load with 20 miles of deadhead on the same haul runs $2.33 per total mile. The second load is the better load. If you're only looking at the loaded-mile rate, you took the worse deal.

The automation script in this template handles one piece of the data entry friction: when you create a new load record, the Last Empty ODO field auto-populates with the Delivery ODO from the previous entry. The log is sorted newest to oldest, so the script pulls the most recent delivery odometer and sets it as the starting baseline for the next load's total miles calculation. You enter the current pickup and delivery odometers, and the deadhead and loaded-mile calculations resolve automatically.

What Company Percentage Actually Costs You Per Load

Company Percentage is a double field — enter the percentage as a decimal (0.12 for 12%, not 12). Company Fee is Gross multiplied by Company Percentage. Net to Truck is Gross minus Company Fee. These three fields exist because the percentage paid to the carrier or dispatch service is the single most negotiable variable in an owner-operator's cost structure, and most operators evaluate it in the abstract rather than as a per-load dollar figure.

At $3,800 gross with 12% company percentage, you pay $456 per load. Over forty loads per month, that is $18,240 per month to the carrier. If you could reduce that to 10%, the savings are $760 per month — $9,120 per year. Seeing that number in actual dollars on every load record changes how you approach the conversation at contract renewal.

Extra Pay captures lumper fees, detention, and layover pay — amounts that don't appear in the load rate but affect cash flow. They're logged separately because they often arrive on a different payment timeline than the base load rate, and mixing them into Gross obscures whether your detention rate is being honored consistently.

After Twenty Loads

Sort by Pay Per Loaded Mile descending. The top five loads all share two characteristics: short deadhead windows and lanes where you had competitive positioning from a prior delivery. The bottom five are spot loads you accepted to avoid sitting, all of them taken more than 300 miles from the next profitable lane.

That deadhead tolerance figure — the maximum deadhead miles after which a load stops being worth taking — is now something you can calculate from your own data rather than guess from intuition. For your operation, with your fuel MPG and company percentage, it's a specific number. It's in the log.