<\/span><\/h2>\nRevenue is easy to report. Margin is the number that decides whether the business is healthy, and it’s the one most often hidden.<\/p>\n
The key is seeing it at more than one level. A customer can look profitable on average and still contain a few lanes that lose money every week. A rep can look busy and still be booking freight at thin margin. Average margin hides all of that.<\/p>\n
The question this report should answer in under a minute: which customers and lanes made us money last quarter, and which cost us?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/span>2. Carrier performance over time<\/span><\/h2>\nMost brokerages track carriers in a shared memory: the dispatcher knows who shows up late, and the new rep learns it the hard way.<\/p>\n
A proper carrier report puts that knowledge on the record. On-time pickup and delivery, how often a carrier accepts a tender, how often a load ends in a claim, and how their rates have moved on the lanes you use them for.<\/p>\n
The value is in the trend. A carrier who was reliable in spring and slipping by autumn is a risk you want to see before a shipper calls to complain.<\/p>\n
<\/span>3. Aging and unbilled loads<\/span><\/h2>\nDelivered but not invoiced is cash sitting in a drawer.<\/p>\n
In a busy brokerage, loads get delivered on Friday and forgotten until someone reconciles at month end. A simple list of delivered loads that haven’t been billed, sorted by age, is often the fastest way to recover cash that was already earned.<\/p>\n
The same view should show what is owed to you and what you owe carriers, by how long it has been outstanding. If that takes a finance person half a day to assemble, it won’t be looked at often enough to matter.<\/p>\n
<\/span>4. Lane profitability against the market<\/span><\/h2>\nKnowing your margin on a lane is useful. Knowing whether that margin makes sense for the lane is better.<\/p>\n
This report compares what you charge and pay on a lane with where the market sits. It shows you where you are winning, and where you are quietly subsidising a customer because the rate was set a year ago and never revisited.<\/p>\n
A common example: a lane priced comfortably last spring, when trucks were easy to find. Carrier costs rise over the summer, the customer rate stays where it was, and the lane keeps moving freight every week while the margin on it slowly disappears. Nobody notices, because the load count looks healthy.<\/p>\n
<\/span>5. Exceptions and detention<\/span><\/h2>\nEvery brokerage has loads that go wrong: late pickups, missed appointments, detention, damaged freight, rolled loads. The problem is rarely one bad load. It’s the pattern.<\/p>\n
An exceptions report shows how often it happens, on which lanes and for which customers, and what it cost. That tells you whether a problem is a one-off or a structural one, such as a shipper whose dock regularly holds trucks for hours.<\/p>\n
Without it, exceptions live in emails and memory, and the lessons are lost.<\/p>\n
It also changes the conversation with customers. “Your dock held our trucks for an average of three hours on eleven loads last month” is a very different discussion from “we’ve had some detention issues lately.” One is a fact you can price into the next rate. The other is a complaint that is easy to brush aside.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Why “we just export it” stops working<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\nExports are fine as a stopgap. The trouble is what they do to trust.<\/p>\n