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Devinity Solutions builds intelligent software and AI agents for businesses that run on operations rather than on screens. Fleetchart is one of those systems, built and hardened inside a working freight operation.
6 min
In this piece
Your cost per mile is every dollar it takes to keep the truck on the road and the business running, divided by the miles you actually drive. Most calculations are wrong because they stop at fuel and the truck payment.
A load's advertised rate per mile counts only loaded miles and only revenue. Restating it across every mile the truck turns, after fuel and its share of fixed cost, routinely reorders which loads are worth taking.
Deadhead is any distance driven with an empty trailer. It is unavoidable in truckload freight and it is controllable, and the gap between a well-planned operation and a poorly-planned one shows up almost entirely in this one number.
A rate confirmation is the written agreement stating what you will be paid and on what terms. Nearly every number needed to judge a load is on that one page, and the fields people skip are the ones that turn into disputes.
The payment clock does not start when you deliver — it starts when a complete invoice package reaches the broker. That gap is usually the cheapest days to recover in a small carrier's cash cycle.
Step two is running your own numbers. Every calculator below is free and asks nothing of you.