I'm an electrical contractor, and for a long time my trucks were black holes. I'd buy a reel of wire, it'd go on a truck, and that was the last anyone accounted for it. We'd send a tech to buy connectors we already had three boxes of two trucks over. Material would walk off and nobody noticed. And plenty of it got used on jobs and never made it onto an invoice, because nobody knew it had been on the truck in the first place.

The hidden cost of an untracked truck

  • Double-buying. A tech can't see what's on the other trucks, so they buy new instead of pulling from stock you already own. You pay twice for the same material.
  • Shrinkage. Material you can't count is material you can't notice going missing.
  • Unbilled usage. Stock pulled off the truck and installed on a T&M job is billable — but only if you knew it was there and tracked it onto the job.
An untracked truck is a warehouse with no inventory system, except it's also moving and the door's unlocked.

Treat each truck as a stock location

The fix is to treat every truck like what it is: a stock location with inventory assigned to it. You know roughly what's on each truck, you can transfer material between locations when you rebalance, and — the important part — when a tech uses something off the truck on a job, it gets allocated to that job. Now it's a tracked cost and a billable line, not material that vanished into the ether.

Where the margin comes back

Two places. First, you stop double-buying, because anyone can see what's already in the fleet before sending someone to the supply house. Second — and this is the bigger one on service work — material that gets used actually gets billed, because pulling it off the truck allocates it to the job instead of disappearing. On a busy service operation, the unbilled-material leak alone is usually worth more than the cost of getting organized.

You don't need a perfect count to win. Even rough truck-stock tracking — what's assigned where, and allocating it to the job when it's used — captures most of the savings. Don't let "we can't count every connector" stop you from tracking the reels of wire and the expensive gear that actually move the number.

The one-minute version

  • Untracked trucks leak margin through double-buys, shrinkage, and unbilled material.
  • Treat each truck as a stock location with inventory assigned to it.
  • Allocate material to the job when it's pulled, so it's costed and billable.
  • Even rough tracking of the expensive stuff captures most of the savings.