Cartage rate vs trading margin: do you know what you made on that job?
Say the truck delivers 30 tonnes of GAP40 across town. The client pays $27 a tonne delivered. You bought it from the quarry at $18. Your cartage rate for that run works out around $6 a tonne. So what did the job actually make?
Most operators can quote the cartage rate instantly. The trading margin — the $9 a tonne between buy and sell, minus what the cartage really cost — usually lives nowhere. The quarry bill lands in one pile, the client invoice in another, and the margin that connects them is invisible until the accountant's year-end pass, if then.
Two businesses in one truck
An operator who buys and sells material is running two businesses at once: a haulage business earning a rate per tonne-kilometre, and a trading business earning a spread per tonne. They have different economics. Cartage margins are tight and capacity-bound; trading margins depend on buy price, product mix, and who you sell to. If you can't see them separately, you can't manage either.
What margin visibility changes
- Quoting. When you know your real margin by material and client, you know where there's room to sharpen a price to win work — and where there isn't.
- Product mix. Some materials earn double the spread of others for the same truck time. Margin reports by material make that obvious.
- Client profitability. The big-volume client at a skinny spread and the small client at a fat one look identical in the cartage report. They aren't.
- Price rises. When the quarry lifts prices, you know exactly which client rates need to move, by how much, from the day it happens.
The trap: floating buy prices
One subtlety matters: the margin must be locked with the buy price at the time the job was created. If your report recalculates old jobs at today's quarry prices, a price rise silently rewrites history and your margin numbers stop meaning anything. Lock the buy price per job; report on what was true when the material moved.
Line-item honesty, all the way to the invoice
CartageCore records buy price and sell price on every trading job, locks the buy at job creation, and reports margin monthly by material, client and job. The Xero invoice carries material supply, cartage and FAF as separate lines — so the commercial picture stays honest from quarry gate to bank account.