Know What Every Trip Actually Costs
Trip planning, vehicle and driver management, fuel and maintenance, delivery proof and cost per trip, for companies that run their own vehicles rather than buying freight from someone else.
A company that owns trucks usually knows its total transport cost to the dong, because the fuel invoices and the driver payroll are right there in the accounts. What it almost never knows is how that total divides: which route, which customer, which vehicle. And without that division the total is a figure you can report but cannot act on.
The practical consequence shows up in two decisions that come round constantly. Should we deliver this order ourselves or hire a carrier? Is this customer, who insists on small frequent deliveries, actually profitable? Both questions have a correct answer and most companies decide them on instinct because the data to decide otherwise was never collected.
iGlobal builds transport management so that every trip carries its own costs: fuel drawn at the pump, the driver's hours, the tolls, the share of maintenance and depreciation for the kilometres run. When a trip closes, its cost is known, and when a month closes, so is the cost to serve each customer.
What a fleet costs when nobody is counting
Fuel is the obvious one and the hardest to control without data. Consumption per hundred kilometres varies by driver far more than most managers expect, and without a litres per trip record there is no way to tell a heavy right foot from a difficult route. Companies that start measuring almost always find a spread they did not know existed.
Maintenance is the second, and it is expensive in the opposite direction. Servicing by calendar rather than by odometer means some vehicles are serviced too often and others too late, and the ones serviced too late fail on the road, where a breakdown costs the repair plus a missed delivery plus a driver waiting.
The third cost is empty running. Vehicles returning empty or routes planned in the order the orders arrived rather than in the order that makes geographic sense can easily add a quarter to the kilometres driven. This is invisible without trip records, and it is one of the few operational savings available without buying anything.
- Transport cost known in total but not by route or customer
- Fuel consumption per vehicle never compared against the fleet
- Servicing scheduled by calendar instead of by odometer
- Delivery confirmation arriving days later on paper
What the transport system covers
Trip planning and load building
Orders grouped into trips by area and delivery window, with vehicle capacity by weight and volume respected so a plan cannot be built that will not physically fit.
Vehicle and document register
Registration, inspection, insurance and permit expiry dates tracked with advance reminders, because an expired document discovered at a checkpoint is a day lost.
Fuel and consumption analysis
Litres recorded per fill with odometer, consumption per hundred kilometres by vehicle and by driver, and outliers flagged rather than buried in a monthly total.
Maintenance by odometer
Service schedules triggered by distance run, repair history per vehicle, parts and labour cost accumulated against the asset so the true cost of keeping an old truck becomes visible.
Driver application and delivery proof
Trip list on the phone, arrival and departure timestamps, photo and signature capture at delivery, and problems reported from the roadside rather than at the depot that evening.
Cost per trip, route and customer
Fuel, driver time, tolls, maintenance and depreciation allocated to each trip, then rolled up so the cost to serve a customer is a number rather than an argument.
How we deliver it
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1
Fleet and route study 1 to 2 weeks
We record the vehicles, the regular routes, how trips are planned today and what is currently written on paper. Most companies already collect more than they realise, just not in a usable form.
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2
Configuration and cost model 2 to 4 weeks
Vehicles, drivers, trip types and the allocation rules for fuel, maintenance and depreciation, agreed with finance so the resulting cost figure is one accounting will stand behind.
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3
Driver application pilot 2 to 3 weeks
A few drivers use the phone application on real trips. Their feedback decides the final design, because an application drivers dislike will be filled in at the end of the week from memory, which is worse than paper.
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4
Rollout and cost reporting 3 to 4 weeks
Whole fleet live, and the first monthly cost per route and per customer report produced and reviewed together so the numbers are understood before they are used in pricing.
Who this is for
- Distributors delivering to retail with their own vehicles
- Manufacturers running inbound and outbound fleets
- Construction and materials businesses with heavy vehicles
- Companies deciding whether to keep delivering in house
Why iGlobal
The cost model is agreed with finance first
A cost per trip that accounting does not recognise is a number people argue about. We agree the allocation rules before configuring anything, so the output is usable in a pricing decision.
Built for drivers who are driving
Large buttons, few fields, works with one hand and tolerates losing signal. We pilot with real drivers before rollout because their adoption is the entire data source.
Connected to orders and accounting
Trips are built from real sales orders and the costs land in the accounts, so transport stops being a separate spreadsheet world with its own version of the truth.
The best balance of cost, quality, and service
No per-vehicle subscription, so adding trucks does not change the software cost, and GPS data from the trackers you already have can be used rather than replaced.
Three ways to do this, compared
| What you are comparing | By hand, on spreadsheets | Off-the-shelf software | With iGlobal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost of one trip | Fuel receipts in an envelope, totalled at month end | Generic expense tracking with no concept of a trip | Fuel, tolls, driver pay and depreciation against that trip |
| Vehicle maintenance | When the driver reports something sounds wrong | A reminder by date, ignoring how far the vehicle has run | Triggered by the odometer and scheduled between trips |
| Deciding whether to deliver or hire a carrier | A feeling about which one is cheaper | No data on the in-house side, so no comparison is possible | Your own cost per kilometre set beside the carrier's quote |
| Cost across three years | Hidden inside salaries, so it never appears in a budget | A predictable licence per user, plus the work it cannot do | Quoted per phase and reviewed with you before each one starts |
| Who holds your data | Scattered across files, inboxes and personal phones | On the vendor platform, exported on the vendor's terms | Your own database, exportable in full whenever you ask |
| When something breaks | The person who built the file, if they still work here | A ticket queue, often in another language and time zone | A named engineer in Hanoi you can reach the same working day |
The two middle columns describe approaches that genuinely work for some companies. Where they win, they win, and we have tried to say so.
What changes after go live
The first number that moves is usually fuel, and it moves for an unglamorous reason: once consumption per vehicle is published weekly, the spread between drivers narrows without anyone being disciplined. Measurement alone recovers a few per cent, which on a fleet fuel bill is not a small amount.
The second is breakdowns. Servicing against the odometer rather than the calendar moves maintenance from reactive to planned, and a workshop visit scheduled on a quiet Tuesday costs a fraction of the same repair performed on the roadside with a load on board.
The third change is commercial rather than operational. With cost to serve available per customer, the company can finally have the conversation about minimum order size and delivery frequency with evidence. Several of our clients found that their most demanding account was also their least profitable, and were able to renegotiate rather than walk away.
- Fuel consumption compared per vehicle and per driver weekly
- Servicing planned by odometer, so fewer roadside failures
- Delivery proof captured at the door, not filed days later
- Cost to serve known per customer and per route
Frequently asked questions
Does this replace our GPS tracking system?
No, it uses it. GPS devices are good at position and speed and poor at telling you what a trip cost or whether the customer signed. We read location data from your existing trackers where an interface is available and combine it with the order, the fuel and the driver record, which is where the management value actually is.
Can we compare in-house delivery against hired carriers?
That is one of the main reasons to implement this. Once cost per trip is real, you can put your own vehicle next to a carrier quotation for the same route and see the answer. In our experience the result is usually mixed: in house wins on dense urban routes and loses on long thin ones, and most companies were doing the opposite of optimal on at least one lane.
Our drivers are not comfortable with smartphones.
This is common and it is a design problem rather than a training problem. The driver application is deliberately narrow: see today's trips, confirm arrival, take a photo, capture a signature. Four actions, large targets, no typing where it can be avoided. Where a driver genuinely cannot use it, the dispatcher can confirm on their behalf and the trip record stays complete.
How is depreciation allocated to a trip?
Normally per kilometre, using the vehicle's book value and expected life, though some clients prefer per operating hour for equipment that idles a lot. The method matters less than picking one and applying it consistently, and we agree it with your accountant so the trip cost reconciles with the depreciation actually posted.
Can it plan the route order automatically?
It can sequence stops sensibly by area and delivery window, which captures most of the available saving. Full mathematical route optimisation is available but we are honest that it earns its complexity only above a certain number of daily stops; below that, a dispatcher who knows the city usually matches it.
Related solutions
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Tell us what you are trying to fix and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right team for it.