Freight operations guide2026-09-27

A trip number is only useful once it adds up to something.

Tagging an invoice to a load tells you what it cost. It does not, by itself, tell you whether the load made money. That takes one more piece: what the load was billed at. Put the two together and a trip number stops being a filing label and starts being a profit-and-loss line — one load at a time.

1. 1

   Tag the cost to the load

   A trip number is free text you generate yourself, not a value read off a document — nothing extracts it. Tag a whole invoice or a single line item to a load, and add or change the tag later, including after approval and after an export.

2. 2

   Record what the load was billed at

   Separately from the costs, record the load’s revenue against the same trip number: a flat amount for the load, or a rate multiplied by the tonnage it carried. This is a number you enter, not one the system extracts — it does not require a cost to already be tagged to that trip.

3. 3

   Read income, expense and margin per load

   With both sides recorded, each load lists its tagged costs, its revenue, and the margin between them — replacing a spreadsheet built by hand from the same two lists.

4. 4

   Know when a margin is not shown, and why

   A margin only appears when the load has revenue and every tagged cost is either in the revenue’s currency or can be converted into it from a billing rate recorded on that invoice. When it cannot, no margin is shown, and the reason is named rather than guessed at — missing revenue, an unrecorded rate, or a cost in a currency that has not been reconciled yet.

5. 5

   Keep costs by currency, never blended

   Costs on a cross-border load are totalled per currency, never summed across currencies into one misleading figure. A margin is only computed once the numbers genuinely share a currency — see costing a cross-border load for how that conversion is recorded.