Bookkeeping when it is just you and a truck

Most bookkeeping advice is written for businesses with an office. If it is you, a truck and a phone, almost all of it is overhead you cannot justify yet.

So here is the smallest setup that is actually worth having — and, just as importantly, what you can safely ignore for now.

The four things to get right

1. Separate accounts. A business checking account and a business card. Every dollar of revenue in, every business cost out.

This is the one people skip because it feels like admin, and it is the one that causes the most trouble later. Mixed accounts make your profit wrong, your tax return wrong, and your deductions arguable. See separating business and personal money.

2. Receipts captured at the point of purchase. Photograph it in the supply house car park, before it becomes confetti in the console. Ten seconds then, impossible in March.

3. A chart of accounts that still works at five trucks. This is the piece of foresight worth having on day one. Direct job costs split from overhead, income split by the lines that matter in your trade. Restructuring later is real work; setting it up right costs nothing extra now. See the chart of accounts a contractor actually needs.

4. A monthly close. Bank reconciled, everything categorised, month locked. An hour, once a month, and it is the thing that turns records into information.

That is the whole list.

What you can ignore for now

Elaborate job costing software. At one truck, knowing which type of work makes money is enough. Per-truck analysis matters when there is more than one truck.

Accrual accounting. Cash basis matches how you already think, and unless a lender is asking, that is fine. See cash basis vs accrual.

An S-corp election. It becomes worth considering once profit is meaningfully above what you would pay someone to do your job. Below that, the cost and admin usually eat the saving. See LLC or S-corp.

A dashboard. Four numbers a month beats forty. Revenue, gross margin, overhead, what you took out.

The three that actually catch people

Paying yourself at random. Money comes out when it is needed and nobody records what it was. Pay yourself a fixed amount on a fixed date, as a draw, recorded as equity rather than an expense. See how much should I pay myself.

No tax set aside. Nobody is withholding for you any more. A separate account, a fixed percentage moved every month off real profit. See quarterly estimated taxes.

Pricing off what the competition charges. At one truck, you are the capacity, so underpricing does not show up as a loss — it shows up as working every Saturday. Work out your real cost per billable hour once. See what you should actually charge.

Why bother this early

Two reasons, and neither is compliance.

Everything is cheaper to get right now. Fixing a chart of accounts with three years of history behind it is a project. Setting it up correctly with three months of history takes an afternoon.

The habits are what survive growth. Contractors who struggle at five trucks are usually not doing anything new — they are doing what they did at one truck, at five times the volume. Whatever you do now is what you will still be doing then.

The honest question about doing it yourself

You can absolutely do this yourself at one truck. Plenty do, and the four things above are genuinely achievable in an hour a month.

The question is whether the hour is the real cost. Most owner-operators we talk to are not doing it in an hour — they are doing it at eleven at night, badly, in a state of low-level dread, and putting it off for weeks at a time.

If that is the actual situation, the comparison is not an hour against a fee. It is your evenings, plus the cost of the things that go wrong when it is done tired.

Related

• Separating business and personal money
• The chart of accounts a contractor actually needs
• What you should actually charge for a service call