The truck is the profit centre
The first move is structural: every dollar in the books gets a unit number. Loads settle to the tractor that hauled them, diesel follows the fuel card that bought it, and repairs land on the VIN that was in the shop. Once that discipline holds, the monthly statement stops being a blended average and becomes a margin per truck, which is the number a fleet actually runs on.
Blended books fail in a specific way. A five-truck operation with one strong contract can look healthy overall while one unit quietly loses money on every kilometre, and the loss stays invisible until the contract ends. Per-truck books surface it in the first month, while the fix is still a pricing conversation or a lane change instead of a write-off.
Revenue gets the same treatment. Loads are booked from rate confirmations and settlement statements, broker deductions show up as visible expense lines instead of vanishing into a net deposit, and receivables age by broker and shipper so the slow payers are named, not felt.
| Cost line | How it reaches the unit's P&L |
|---|---|
| Fuel | Fuel-card statements coded by unit, never posted as one monthly total |
| Driver pay | Mileage or percentage settlements mapped to the truck driven |
| Maintenance | Work orders and parts invoices by VIN, plus the monthly reserve charge |
| Insurance, plates, truck payments | Fixed costs allocated to each unit every month |
| Dispatch, office, software | Held below the line as overhead so unit margins stay honest |
Maintenance reserves: the cost exists before the invoice does
Tires, brakes, clutches and the eventual in-frame rebuild are not surprises. They are per-kilometre costs that arrive in lumps, and books that only record repairs when the shop bills them will make an older tractor look profitable right up to the month it stops being a truck. So we build a reserve rate per kilometre from your own repair history, charge it to each unit monthly, and let the reserve absorb the lumps. The rate is not one number for the yard, either: a two-year-old tractor and an eight-year-old one carry different reserves, reset yearly from actual work orders.
Two things follow. First, the repair-or-replace decision gets a real basis: when a unit's true per-kilometre cost passes what a newer tractor would run, the statement says so before the next roadside call does. Second, an honest tax point: the CRA allows no deduction for repairs not yet done, so the reserve never touches the T2. It is a cash and pricing discipline, and the deduction arrives when the work order does.
Factoring without counting revenue twice
Factoring is routine in freight, and it is also the fastest way to wreck a set of books. The invoice you issue to the shipper or broker is revenue once, with HST where it applies. The advance from the factor is not income; it settles part of the receivable you just sold. The holdback comes later, the fee is a financing cost that deserves its own visible line, and a recourse chargeback puts the receivable back on your books rather than into thin air.
We reconcile the factor statement every month so advances, reserves and fees all tie out. One liability never moves: HST is remitted on the freight invoice you issued, not on the cash the factor sent, so a carrier remitting from bank deposits will underpay and eventually hear about it. Booked properly, factoring also shows its true annual cost, the number that later funds the decision to leave it behind.
Payroll, HST and a year-end without a clean-up bill
Our End-to-End Accounting service puts bookkeeping, driver payroll, financial reporting and tax filing under one roof. Driver pay runs from settlement data with source deductions remitted on time, T4s at year-end and records of employment when a driver moves on, and WSIB coverage, compulsory for Ontario trucking, stays current on the same calendar. On the HST side, freight you invoice to shippers delivering in Ontario carries 13%, input tax credits come back on diesel, tires and repairs, and loads hauled for another carrier as interline work can be zero-rated, a distinction our tax pages treat in depth.
The file lives in QuickBooks Online with Dext capturing the paper, so year-end flows straight into the T2 through Corporate Tax Filing with no catch-up billing. We work with fleets across Mississauga and the GTA trucking belt around Pearson, and with single-truck operators who mostly need answers, where CPA Quick Support at $99 a month keeps a CPA on call between filings. Every engagement starts with a free 15-minute discovery call and a written quote.
