Know what every truck costs you.

Most fleet owners can tell you to the dollar what their newest truck cost on the lot. Ask what that same truck has cost over the last 18 months in repairs, fuel, registration, insurance, and idle time, and the answer usually starts with “let me check the spreadsheet.”

That gap is where money quietly leaks. A vehicle running at 1.8x the fleet average cost-per-mile is paying for itself in problems, not loads. Owners just don't see it until tax time, and by then the truck has had another quarter to drag the books down.

Fleet Costs in Dockex is built around per-vehicle P&L. Every transaction (materials, labor, fuel, registration fees, maintenance expense, insurance allocation) attaches to a specific VIN. The dashboard rolls those up into revenue vs cost per truck, so the worst performer in the fleet is visible the moment you land on the page.

Cost-alert badges run on the fleet average. A truck at 1.5x the average earns an amber badge. 2x gets a red one. That's the range where most owners I talk to make the repair-vs-replace call, so the threshold matches the decision.

Fuel gets its own layer. The Fuel Efficiency Score rates the fleet 0-100, dropping when your fuel cost runs above the national average, when trucks show declining MPG, for your top fuel consumers, and for excessive idling. The recommendation engine pairs with the score: specific dollar-amount opportunities ranked by impact, tied to specific trucks. The spend projection takes your recent spending rate and carries it through the end of the current quarter, so the budget number isn't a guess.

Getting this into your books is one export away. Dockex hands you per-vehicle cost data — registration fees, maintenance, fuel — as CSV, so your bookkeeper imports it instead of re-keying a fleet spreadsheet. A direct QuickBooks Online sync that sets the vehicle as QuickBooks class is on the way, so the class report runs itself once it lands.

None of this is complicated math. It's the kind of visibility a 3-truck fleet can hold in their head and a 30-truck fleet absolutely cannot. I wrote more about that breakpoint in how to manage a small fleet. The short version: the cost story falls apart between 10 and 20 trucks, and the only fix is to bind cost data to the vehicle record instead of to a tab in a workbook.

The honest pitch on Fleet Costs is the same as the rest of Dockex: stop guessing. Pull the numbers. Per truck, per month, per category. If the worst performer is paying for itself, great. If it isn't, the dashboard told you on a Tuesday instead of an April 15th.

A few specifics that show up in the worked examples I keep running with owners. Registration and IRP fees should land in the cost stack alongside parts and labor, because over a year an interstate tractor carries real plate, apportioned-IRP, and state fees on top of parts and labor. That's real money the per-vehicle P&L tab in most spreadsheets misses. Dockex rolls your filing fees into the cost stack so the cost number is honest.

Same with insurance. Most owners allocate insurance as a line-item against the fleet, which hides the per-truck reality. Dockex lets you split insurance allocation per vehicle by radius, class, or driver pool, so the cost-per-mile number reflects the actual exposure each truck carries.