A haulier can be profitable and still run out of money, and it can burn cash for a year while building something worth owning. The finance card on the operations screen has two tabs because those are two different questions.
The result: what hauling earned
The result is built from departures that have arrived and settled. Each one carries its own cost sheet, written when the truck rolled out, so the breakdown is what actually happened rather than a model run afterwards.
The lines are:
Freight revenue — what the shippers paid, less any share paid out to a partner on a shared route. A pallet pays $22 plus 5.6 cents a kilometre; a reefer pallet pays 2.6 times that and takes two pallet places, a special load 5.5 times and takes four.
Fuel — diesel burnt at the price you paid for it, not today's price. On a long haul this is roughly a third of the whole cost sheet.
Emission quota — every kilo of diesel burnt costs quota.
Crew — the driver, at $13 per clock hour, a little over $310 a day. Note the clock hour: the rest period is already inside the rate, because a driver who is legally parked is still on your payroll. A training centre cuts it.
Maintenance — charged per pallet slot and clock hour, multiplied by how mixed your fleet is. For a 33-pallet rig that is around 17 cents a kilometre: tyres, servicing and parts plus an average road toll. It runs on every departure and is separate from the workshop visits you order by hand.
Terminal dues — a gate and weighbridge fee per call that scales with the size of the destination, plus a handling charge for every pallet actually lifted. Two thirds of the bill follows the load, so a half-empty trailer pays a smaller one.
Cargo handling — lashing, straps, the consignment note and the customs papers at the border, scaled by how much of the load is refrigerated or special. A dry pallet is markedly cheaper to handle than a temperature-controlled one.
Depreciation — what your trucks lost in value over those hours: 12% of list price per 6,000 hours, the same curve the company valuation uses. This is the one line that did not cost you cash, and the reason the result and the cash flow diverge even in a quiet week. Leased trucks are not depreciated — you do not own them, and the rent is a standing cost instead.
Departures made before cost sheets existed appear as one honest remainder line rather than being spread across the categories by guesswork.
Standing costs: what the company owes
These are charged in the Monday settlement and belong to the company, not to any one departure, so they cannot be read out of a haul. They are shown as what they cost per week at your current setup:
Loan interest, from the moment the loan was taken.
Truck leases, around 1.2% of list price a month for anything you rent rather than own.
Service level — your target multiplied by the pallet slots in your fleet, at 50 cents a slot per point of the target. This is a commitment, not a purchase; see Facilities.
Terminal staff overtime, whenever a base handles more departures than its level supports.
The cash flow: what moved through the account
Every change to your balance is recorded with what caused it. This is where a truck purchase appears — it never touches the result, because you swapped cash for an asset of similar value, and yet it can empty the account in an afternoon.
Reading the two tabs against each other is the point:
Profitable result, falling cash: you are buying trucks or repaying debt faster than the network earns. Sustainable for a while, on purpose.
Poor result, rising cash: you are borrowing or selling shares. This is survivable and sometimes correct, but it is not a business yet.
Both falling: the network is not paying for itself. Look at the result lines before you look at anything else.
The log keeps the last month. Anything older is discarded, because the interest in a cash movement is entirely in how recent it is.
Borrowing
The lending rate is a market. It wanders the way the diesel price does — a mean it drifts back towards, a floor and a ceiling — and the bank screen carries its history on the same chart the fuel market uses.
Your rate is three things added together:
The market rate on the day you sign.
A premium for how leveraged you already are. Borrowing against a company that is mostly debt costs more, which is the point.
A premium for how long you fix it. Six months costs nothing extra, a year a little, two years more.
You may borrow up to 150% of equity. Interest runs from the moment you sign and comes off when your departures settle — there is no due date to miss, and sleeping players are never charged for time they did not play.
The term is a bet. When it expires the loan rolls at whatever the market rate is then, plus the same premiums. Fixing short is cheap and leaves you exposed; fixing long costs more and buys certainty. This is the same trade as a diesel contract, and it fails in the same way: cheap right up until the moment it is not.
Repaying before the term is up costs 1% of what you repay. After the term, it costs nothing.