Two different businesses, one truck
If you haul for a cartage rate, you're selling truck time: the client pays per tonne or per load, and your cost is the truck, the driver and the diesel. If you also buy aggregate at the pit and sell it delivered, you're a trader: you make money on the difference between the buy price and the sell price, and the cartage is part of the delivered price.
Most aggregate operators run both at once. The problem is they manage them as one number.
The numbers that hide it
Say you sell AP40 delivered at $18.50 a tonne, and your rate card shows a healthy-looking margin. Then the pit price goes up $1.20 a tonne — or your FAF formula was never applied to the buy side — and suddenly the "margin" on that product is gone. The rate card didn't change. The invoice looks the same. But the job is now losing money, and nothing on your paperwork says so.
That's the difference in one line:
- Cartage rate — what the client pays you per tonne/load/hour/day, and what your rate card prices.
- Trading margin — sell price minus buy price per tonne, on the tonnes that actually moved.
If you only ever look at the first number, the second one can quietly go negative. And because the trucks are busy and the invoices are going out, it doesn't look like anything's wrong until the bank statement does the reconciliation for you.
Busy is not profitable. Tonnes moved is revenue; margin is the number that pays the mortgage. They're measured differently, and they need to be seen differently.
Where the margin really lives
Margin per job, per client, per product. Not an average at year end. Averages hide the pattern: the client who always wants the product with the thinnest margin, the product whose pit price moved three months ago and never got re-priced, the site that's 40km further than the rate assumed.
- Per product. Which products carry margin, which are loss leaders wearing a rate card? If river sand sells at exactly your buy price, you're moving it for nothing — and now you can see it.
- Per client. Which clients' work is worth chasing? Margin per client answers it with numbers, not vibes.
- Per job. The load record carries the buy and sell price per tonne, so the margin is visible on the load itself — not reconstructed in a spreadsheet at month end.
How Cartage Core keeps the two honest
The trading margin module stores the buy price per tonne against the product and the sell price per tonne against the client rate. Every captured load prices both sides, and the margin shows up on the job. When the pit price moves, you update the buy price once — and the margin on every affected load updates with it.
The cartage rate still does its job on the invoice: the client is billed exactly what the contract says. The trading margin does its job on your decision-making: you can see, in one view, which work actually makes money.
The takeaway
The rate card is what you charge. The margin is what you keep. Run them as one number and you'll find out which products are losing money the hard way. Keep them separate — buy per tonne, sell per tonne, margin per job — and the business shows you its own truth, load by load.
