One Of Your Routes Is Paying For The Others
A farmers market, a wholesale drop and a home delivery loop cost wildly different amounts to serve. A single company-wide margin averages all of it into one number that looks fine.
- Cost per run and per stop for each route, from miles, hours and handling
- The gap between your blended margin and your worst route, which is usually the useful figure
- Best and worst marked automatically, so the ranking is obvious
- Runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us or saved anywhere
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A Healthy 68% Margin, Hiding A Route Running At 10%
Three routes on ordinary figures: 85 cents a mile, $28 an hour loaded, $1.50 of handling per stop. Every route is profitable. The blend still tells you almost nothing.
Saturday market, 60 miles, 8 hours, one stop
80.3%
Wholesale, 90 miles, 4 hours, two stops
78.7%
Home delivery loop, 140 miles, 9 hours, 22 stops
10.2%
Blended, which is the number most operations run on
68.3%
58 points That is the distance between the number on your management report and the worst thing you are actually doing. Nobody is going to find that in a company-wide margin, because averaging is exactly what hides it. The home delivery loop costs $18.36 a stop to serve and returns $2.09.
Three Rates, Then Five Figures Per Route
Set the rates once and they apply to every route. Name the routes whatever you call them.
Rate
Cost per mile
Fuel, maintenance, tires and the vehicle wearing out. Not just what you put in the tank.
Rate
Labor per hour
Loaded: wages plus tax and insurance, or what your own time is worth if you drive.
Rate
Handling per stop
Packaging, ice, paperwork. Small per drop, large across 22 of them.
Route
Miles, hours and stops
Round trip, door to door, and how many drops you make on the way.
Route
Revenue and frequency
What the run brings in, and how many times a month you do it.
Out
Margin, ranked
Per run, per stop and per month, with best and worst flagged and the gap to your blend spelled out.
Useful if
- You deliver to more than one kind of customer
- You are wondering whether home delivery is worth the trouble
- Someone has asked you to add a stop, or a town, or a market
- You carry one price list across channels that cost very different amounts to serve
- Your margin looks fine and your week does not
Probably not, if
- Every customer collects from you, in which case there is no route to compare
- You have one channel only. Use the break-even calculator instead
- You want full route optimisation. This tells you what a route costs, not the fastest way to drive it
$1Mline of credit, won on the strength of the model
A client this applies to
“We would simply not be where we are today if it weren’t for the supportive team at Good Roots.”
– Stephanie Painter, Painterland Sisters
The ten-year financial model we built with Painterland broke out margins by sales channel, alongside unit production costs and yield. That is the same discipline as this calculator, and it is what let them walk into their community bank prepared rather than hopeful.
Read what happened