IFTA reporting, per-mile costing, factoring reconciliation, owner-operator settlements, and the cash-flow rhythms of running a fleet on a 60-day pay cycle — delivered by an accounting team that speaks the language of dispatch, lanes, and equipment debt. For owner-operators, small fleets, and mid-size logistics companies.
Independent owner-operators running their own authority or leased to a carrier. Single-truck businesses where simplicity matters but professional bookkeeping still pays for itself — fuel optimization, IFTA reporting, deduction capture, and clean records when it's time to upgrade equipment or sell the rig.
The sweet spot where most of our trucking clients live. You've got drivers, equipment, dispatch, factoring, IFTA across multiple states, and the cash-flow gymnastics of waiting 30-60 days to get paid by brokers while payroll runs every Friday. The bookkeeper that worked for two trucks isn't keeping up.
Logistics businesses where the trucks belong to someone else. Freight brokers managing carrier networks, 3PLs running multi-modal operations, and dispatch services. Different accounting needs: carrier payment processing, broker margin tracking, and the bond and licensing compliance unique to brokerage.
You know the gross revenue per mile. You don't know your fully-loaded cost — fuel, maintenance, insurance, equipment depreciation, driver, overhead — by the mile. So when a broker offers $2.40/mile, you can't tell if you're making money or losing it.
Quarterly IFTA filing turns into a three-day scramble pulling fuel receipts and trying to reconstruct miles by state from ELD logs. Half the time the filing's late. The other half, you're not sure if it's right.
The factor takes their cut, holds a reserve, releases the rest, charges fees, and you've got no idea how it ties out month to month. Your P&L shows revenue numbers that don't match deposits and your CPA flags it every spring.
If you only get one accounting practice right in a trucking business, get this one: know your true cost per mile. Not your rough estimate. Not your gut feel. The actual, fully-burdened number that includes every dollar your business spends to keep a truck on the road, divided by the miles you drove.
When you know this number with precision, you can do three things that fleets without it can't:
Getting to a real cost-per-mile number isn't complicated, but it does require the books to be set up correctly — fuel tracked separately from other equipment costs, driver compensation properly burdened, depreciation methodology matched to actual usage rather than time, and overhead allocated rationally. That's standard work for us. It's not what most general bookkeepers know how to do.
You're running your own truck. Maybe you have your own authority; maybe you're leased on. Either way, the business is mostly you — but the accounting needs are real. Every receipt is potentially a deduction. Every fuel stop touches IFTA. Every mile gets tracked for both fuel tax and depreciation purposes. The IRS treats your truck as a sophisticated business, and your books should too.
Most owner-operators do one of two things, and both are wrong:
Owner-operator engagements at Anchor Point are right-sized — you're not paying for the full back-office of a 30-truck fleet. We focus on what specifically matters for a one-truck business:
For single-truck owner-operators, our engagements typically run $1,500 to $2,500 per month — significantly less than our standard $3K floor for multi-truck businesses. We can deliver this pricing because the scope is naturally simpler. If you scale to multiple trucks or add complexity, the engagement scales with you.
Owner-operators considering adding a second or third truck should know: the cost-per-mile and operational data we build for you on a single-truck engagement becomes the foundation for evaluating whether expansion makes sense, what equipment to buy, and how to structure your operation as it grows. We've helped clients walk into and out of expansion decisions with real data instead of optimism.
Most of our trucking clients run between 3 and 50 trucks. This is the segment where the bookkeeping needs have outgrown what one person can handle, but the business isn't large enough to justify a full in-house accounting team. Driver settlements, IFTA across multiple states, factoring, equipment financing, payroll for hourly mechanics and salaried dispatchers, per-diem programs, and the constant question of whether each lane is making money — all running simultaneously.
At one truck, you're a sophisticated solopreneur. At 3+ trucks, you're running a real business with all the complexity that implies. Here's what scales with you:
Almost every trucking company we work with factors at least some of their receivables. The cash flow math demands it — brokers and shippers pay on 30-60 day terms, but your drivers, fuel, and equipment payments don't wait. Factoring fills the gap, and it's not optional for most fleets under 100 trucks.
The accounting challenge with factoring is that it creates a four-way reconciliation:
Without monthly reconciliation, factoring becomes a black box. Money flows in and out and nobody can explain it. The P&L doesn't match deposits. Year-end produces a fire drill. We reconcile factoring activity monthly, produce a clean factoring summary, and book the activity correctly so the books actually tell the story of the business.
Logistics businesses where you don't own the trucks have a fundamentally different financial profile from asset-based fleets. Freight brokers, 3PLs, dispatch services, and last-mile coordinators run on margin between what shippers pay and what carriers get paid — a margin that's often single-digit percentages on millions of dollars of revenue flowing through the books.
That structural reality changes the accounting in several specific ways.
Freight brokers face a specific question: do you book gross revenue (what the shipper pays) or net revenue (the margin you keep after paying the carrier)? The answer matters enormously — gross-revenue booking inflates your top line but distorts margin reporting; net-revenue booking shows a smaller business but produces accurate financial metrics that lenders and buyers want to see.
The correct accounting treatment under GAAP depends on whether you're acting as principal (taking on the credit risk and operational responsibility) or as agent (just connecting shipper and carrier). Most freight brokers should be reporting net under current accounting standards, but plenty of broker books still show gross. This matters when you're applying for a line of credit (bankers want to see real margin), when you're considering a sale (buyers want net revenue and EBITDA), and when you're filing taxes (the underlying numbers should be consistent).
For most brokers, the proper GAAP treatment is net (margin only), not gross (full freight invoice). Books that report gross often look much larger but have very thin margins; books that report net are smaller-looking but show realistic margin percentages. Lenders, investors, and buyers all underwrite to net. If your books are gross-based and you're heading toward a financing event, this needs fixing first.
Brokers and 3PLs pay carriers from broker funds. The carrier payment process — typically a 30-day pay cycle with quick-pay options, sometimes through a third-party payment service like RMIS or TriumphPay — generates a constant stream of payable activity that needs to be tracked, matched against carrier setup packets, and reconciled monthly.
Done correctly, your books show outstanding carrier payables, pre-paid quick-pay deductions, escrowed bond and insurance verifications, and clean year-end 1099 reporting for every carrier paid above the threshold. Done badly, year-end becomes a panic attack and 1099s go out wrong.
Freight brokers are required to maintain a $75,000 surety bond (or trust fund) with FMCSA. That bond has accounting and renewal implications. Brokerage and motor carrier authority numbers, UCR registrations, IFTA accounts where applicable, and state-level compliance all have accounting impacts that need to be tracked.
The truth most freight brokers don't share publicly: a typical freight brokerage operates on 12-18% gross margin and net margins under 5%. That means a $1M brokerage might keep $40,000-$50,000 in real profit, before owner compensation. The math only works at scale, and only with operational discipline. The accounting needs to support that discipline — load-level margin tracking, customer profitability, carrier reliability scoring backed by financial data, and the cash flow forecasting that keeps you solvent through inevitable broker-to-carrier payment timing gaps.
30-minute discovery call. Bring us your last three months of financials, your TMS access, and a quick description of how you make money. We'll tell you what we'd do differently and what it would cost.
Book a Discovery Call →Whether you're running one truck on your own authority or managing a 30-truck mixed fleet, every Anchor Point trucking engagement includes the same monthly foundation — plus the trucking-specific deliverables your business actually needs.
Real, fully-burdened cost per mile by truck, lane, or equipment type. The single most valuable number in your business, calculated monthly.
Fuel by jurisdiction, miles by state, properly reconciled and filed on time every quarter. IRP renewals coordinated annually.
Monthly reconciliation between your TMS, factor advances, customer payments, and factor releases. Clean books, no black box.
Weekly or bi-weekly settlements for your O/O drivers — earnings, fuel advances, escrow, maintenance reserves, and net pay. 1099-ready at year-end.
P&L, balance sheet, cash flow — delivered consistently with plain-English commentary on what changed and what to watch.
Tractors, trailers, equipment — every note, lease, and balloon tracked with rate, term, payment, and remaining balance. Lender-ready.
For fleets running broker AR cycles — rolling forecast mapping receivables, factoring releases, payroll, fuel, and equipment payments.
Quarterly or monthly conversations about lane mix, customer concentration, equipment decisions, financing strategy, and growth direction.
Trucking businesses operate under a regulatory framework that touches the books in ways most accountants don't realize. DOT registrations, FMCSA filings, IFTA, IRP, drug & alcohol testing programs, hours-of-service compliance, and the constant background reality that a fleet audit can land on your desk with limited warning — all have accounting and documentation implications.
Anchor Point doesn't replace your DOT compliance manager or your safety director. What we do is make sure the financial side of compliance is handled — the books reflect what's actually happening, the documentation is organized, and you're not creating tax or financial reporting problems on top of any compliance issues.
Most fleets discover compliance gaps when an audit triggers them — at which point fixing the books while responding to the audit becomes a fire drill. We keep trucking client books in an audit-ready state continuously. Fuel records reconciled. Mileage documentation supporting IFTA filings. Driver expense detail available. When the audit notice arrives, you respond from a position of organization, not panic.
Yes. IFTA (International Fuel Tax Agreement) quarterly reporting is a standard part of our trucking and logistics engagements. We track fuel purchases by jurisdiction, miles driven by jurisdiction (from your ELD or trip records), and produce the quarterly IFTA returns required by Texas and any other base-state jurisdictions where you operate. We also handle IRP (International Registration Plan) apportioned plate renewals.
Per-mile costing is the practice of calculating your true cost per mile to operate — fuel, maintenance, insurance, driver compensation, equipment depreciation, permits, tolls, and overhead — divided by miles driven. Without per-mile costing, trucking companies bid on freight without knowing whether each load is profitable at the rate offered. With it, you can decline unprofitable loads, negotiate better rates, and choose lanes intentionally. It's the single most valuable accounting practice for any fleet operator.
Yes. Most trucking companies factor receivables to bridge the long pay cycle from broker and shipper customers. Factoring activity creates a specific accounting pattern: a percentage of invoice gets advanced when the load delivers, the remaining "reserve" gets released when the customer pays, factoring fees come out of the reserve, and reconciliation has to match three sets of records (your books, the factor's statement, and the customer's payment). We reconcile factoring monthly and produce clean records that hold up for lenders and eventual sale.
Owner-operator settlements are the weekly or bi-weekly statements showing what each driver earned, what was deducted (fuel advances, insurance, equipment lease, escrow), and what gets paid out. Settlement accounting requires careful tracking by driver, accurate cost allocation, and proper 1099 reporting at year-end. We run settlements as part of our trucking engagements, including the year-end 1099 process for owner-operators classified as independent contractors.
Yes. We work alongside the major trucking TMS platforms — McLeod, TruckingOffice, Tailwind, Axon, ProTransport, and others. Most have QuickBooks integrations that work when configured correctly. Our trucking onboarding includes verifying or rebuilding your TMS-to-accounting integration so dispatch data flows cleanly into your books and you stop reconciling two systems by hand.
Yes. Single-truck owner-operators are one of our specific service segments. Engagements for owner-operators typically run $1,500-$2,500 per month — naturally less than our multi-truck fleet pricing because the scope is naturally simpler. We handle bookkeeping, IFTA, IRP, and the tax-ready records that make your year-end CPA work cleaner and cheaper.
Monthly engagements for trucking and logistics businesses at Anchor Point typically range from $3,000 to $8,000 depending on fleet size, number of drivers, multi-state operations, and how much CFO-level guidance is needed. Small fleets (1-5 trucks) usually land at the lower end. Mid-size fleets (10-50 trucks) typically run $5,000-$8,000. Larger fleets or multi-entity operations are quoted custom. Owner-operators run $1,500-$2,500. All engagements are fixed-fee with no hourly billing.
Whether you're running one truck on your own authority or managing a 30-truck mixed fleet, 30 minutes with us will tell you what your books should be showing you and aren't. We'll calculate your real cost per mile during the call if you bring three months of financials.