Moving Company: Profit per Job and per Crew, Not per Number of Moves

«I run six trucks and four crews. In summer we do 12–14 moves a day, the phone never stops, and at the end of the month there's less cash on hand than last year, when I had four trucks. I sat down and worked out the profit on every single job separately. Turned out every third move we do for almost nothing — the downtime between addresses and the crew overpay eat it all. The average was hiding it.» — owner of a moving company, Kyiv

Moving is a business where it feels like profit depends directly on the number of jobs. More moves, more money — simple logic. Trucks run from dawn to night, crews are booked, clients call and pay. Then on the last day of the month you look at the balance and can't figure out where it went. You did more jobs than last year, after all. Sound familiar? Then let's work out why «lots of moves, trucks rolling, but the profit is thin» — and how to start seeing money not for the company as a whole, but per job and per crew. Because that's where profit is either born or quietly leaks away.

What profit per job and per crew means in plain words

Profit per job is how much actually remains from a move after you've paid for everything that went into it. Take the price the client paid and subtract that job's direct costs: the movers' pay on that run, fuel for the route, packing materials, and the platform commission. Office rent, ads, the dispatcher's salary and your own — leave those out; those are costs of the whole company, not of one move.

Profit per crew (or per truck) is the same thing, rolled up over the month for a specific team: how many jobs the crew did, how much it brought in, and how much it ate in wages, fuel and downtime. Two crews can do the same number of moves and bring in very different profit: one works compactly downtown, the other roams the outskirts with empty runs between addresses.

The difference is fundamental. Company profit as a whole is one pot where everything is mixed together: fat office moves, loss-making discounted apartment moves, downtime on weekdays and a frenzy on weekends. Profit per job and per crew shows which type of move feeds you and which quietly eats you. In moving this is critical, because jobs are wildly different: shifting a studio within one district and clearing a four-room apartment from a fifth floor with no lift across town are two different businesses inside yours.

Why «number of moves» lies

Here's the trap. The number of moves is a utilization figure, not a profit one. You can do 14 jobs in a day and earn less than the company next door on eight. Money comes from the margin of each move, and margin depends on complexity, distance, floor, crew pay and how long the truck sat idle between addresses.

Picture two days. On Monday the crew did four cheap discounted apartment moves and the margin on each was pennies, because you paid the movers the same full day either way. On Tuesday the same crew did two office moves with a proper invoice and finished by six. Count-wise it's four against two; profit-wise it's the reverse. Measure yourself by count and you cheer the wrong day.

There's an even sneakier side. The number of jobs reassures you exactly when you should be on guard. The company grows, you add two trucks, jobs are up 40% for the season, everything looks great. In reality half of those new jobs are cheap discounted apartment moves you took just to keep the trucks busy, and they bring almost nothing after crew pay and fuel. Turnover rose, the hassle doubled, and there's the same cash or less. You'll see it when the season ends and there's no cushion for winter — you spent all summer hauling air and measuring yourself by the number of runs.

Example: four moves in one day

Let's look at a real picture. One crew, one summer day, four jobs. Here's what the day looks like when you count each move separately.

Total revenue 37,500, margin 11,400. On average 30%. Looks like a good day. Now look at the last two rows. The no-lift move gave a token 9%: a fifth floor means an extra hour of crew work on every sofa and fridge, plus the drive across town burned fuel and time. The discounted studio is outright in the red: the crew drove to the outskirts, waited for the client, then came back empty. The client paid, and you lost money on them.

Those two moves live off the office one. Drop them and the crew earns almost the same in a day with less fatigue and no risk of breaking something on the fifth floor. That's what the average hides: two profitable jobs carry two loss-making ones, and you see only «30% for the day».

Now multiply that by a season. You take three or four such «discount studios» a day to keep the truck moving. Each one alone is trivial — minus 500–600 hryvnia — but together over a month they eat 30,000–40,000 in profit. That's why small loss-making jobs are more dangerous than one big problem job: the big one is visible at once, a pile of small ones quietly dissolves in the turnover.

Movers, downtime and empty runs — the main variable

In moving, mover pay isn't one of the costs, it's the main variable cost. On a typical job it takes 35 to 55 percent of the invoice. And here lies the industry's main trap: how you pay the crew. Hourly or by the job — this decides who carries the downtime risk, you or them.

If you pay movers hourly or by the day, you cover all the downtime. The crew arrives at ten, the client hasn't packed or vacated the flat, and the men sit in the truck for an hour on your dime. A gap between two jobs is your money again. Over a day these «holes» add up to two or three hours per crew: you pay for work that didn't happen, and the client doesn't pay for it. If you pay by the job, the downtime risk sits partly with the crew, but then people rush and more often break things.

Empty runs are a separate line almost nobody counts. The truck drove to the outskirts, did the move, and returned downtown empty — those kilometres are pure cost: fuel, wear, and crew time you're paying for. A compact route, where the next job is near the last one, can double a crew's daily margin without a single extra job.

The most common mistake here is counting movers «on average for the month». The owner says payroll is 40% of revenue, that's normal. In reality on office moves it's 30%, and on cheap apartment moves it's a full 60%, because the price is small and the hours are the same. Spread crew pay across specific jobs by actual time and the picture by type of move changes sharply — you finally see the cheap jobs bloating your main cost.

Fuel and vehicle depreciation — the costs that ride quietly

Fuel seems like a trifle until you count it on a specific route. A move across the whole city, outskirts to outskirts, with an empty return can burn enough fuel to eat half the margin of a cheap job — and that's not rare in summer, with traffic jams and the cab air-conditioning running all day. Tie fuel to the job at least roughly, by mileage, and the cheap long-distance moves show their true face immediately.

Vehicle depreciation is a cost you don't see in the moment, because the money doesn't leave the till every day. But it does leave. A van on moving jobs works hard: constant loading and unloading, city driving, traffic, overloading with furniture. The engine, clutch, brakes and tyres wear faster than on an ordinary vehicle. Once every year or two it surfaces as a major repair for several hundred thousand hryvnia — and if you're not setting money aside monthly, it becomes a «surprise» that punches a hole in the till exactly when you need the truck.

A practical rule: build into the cost of every move a small percentage for wear and future repair — a notional 5–8% of the invoice. That isn't greed; it's the honest price of the truck being at work. Companies that skip it live from breakdown to breakdown and wonder why «the money was just here, and now it's gone».

The underpriced hard moves

Moving companies lose the most profit not on cheap jobs, but on hard ones priced like easy ones. The client says on the phone «two-room, needs moving», you quote a standard price, and on site it turns out: fifth floor no lift, a piano, narrow stairs, a sofa that won't fit through the doorway. A crew that should have finished in three hours struggles for six. And the price is already set.

A fifth floor with no lift isn't «a bit longer». Every item the movers carry up and down by hand, and on heavy furniture this doubles the crew's time. Oversized items — a safe, a billiard table, a big fridge, that grand piano — need more people, sometimes special rigging, and a risk nobody paid extra for. A narrow entrance or no room for the truck adds another hour of carrying alone.

The fix is simple, and almost nobody uses it: capture the key parameters at the request stage and build them into the price. Floor and lift, oversized items, where the truck parks, how far to carry. Three or four questions from the dispatcher save you a loss-making run. A hard move should cost more not because you're greedy, but because it genuinely takes twice the man-hours — and the client understands that if you explain it up front, not on site.

How it sounds in real life

«We just take every lead so the truck isn't idle.» Idle or driving empty — the difference is small if the move loses money. Sometimes it's better for the truck to sit an hour than haul air to the outskirts.

«All my moves are profitable, I'm not fool enough to work at a loss.» The most common line, and almost always untrue. The owner counts in his head by the big office moves, where the margin is obvious, and never checks the small apartment ones. The loss hides precisely in the cheap, distant and hard jobs taken at the price of easy ones.

«I'll add another truck and push the number of moves up.» If some of those moves are loss-making, it gets harder, not easier. More trucks, more wages, more fuel, more downtime, less cash on hand. The number of runs doesn't equal profit, and the bigger the fleet, the more painfully this surfaces.

«I'll cut the price to win the client and make it up on volume.» In moving this almost never works. Volume means more crew hours and more fuel, so your direct costs grow along with revenue. A thin margin per job doesn't improve at scale — volume just multiplies the problem.

How to see this in Finmap

To count profit per job and per crew you don't need a complex system. You need money to come in and be booked out with a link to a specific move and crew. In Finmap it works like this.

Income by type of move and by crew. Tag each job with a type (office, apartment, long-distance, hard) and the crew that did it. Payment comes in — and you immediately see how much office moves brought, how much the cheap apartment ones did, and which crew earned more, rather than one lump sum.

Direct costs kept separate. Book mover pay, fuel, packing materials and commissions against the same job. Now the invoice sits next to its cost, and the margin works itself out. Downtime and empty runs become visible too: if a crew got paid for the day but did few jobs, it shows up right away in its profit.

Margin on each. You open a report and see a ranked list: office moves give 47%, cheap apartment ones 9%, discount studios in the red. The average that reassured you falls apart into concrete jobs you can act on: raise some in price, drop others.

The payment calendar. Moving lives on crew wages and fuel, paid on time regardless of when the client settled the invoice. The calendar shows upcoming payments and receipts ahead, so you see a cash gap before it happens. This hurts especially in the off-season, when summer is packed and winter is empty.

Next, a few things worth doing this very week.

• Work out the margin on every move for at least one week. Not in your head — on paper or in Finmap, with the real figures for crew pay and fuel.
• Flag every job with a margin below 15%. That's your list for a price review or a refusal.
• Add three or four questions at the request stage: floor and lift, oversized items, parking, distance. Build complexity into the price up front.
• Count profit per crew per month, not just per company — that shows who earns and who hauls air.
• Ask the dispatcher to build compact routes: the next job near the last one sharply cuts empty runs.
• Build into a move's cost not just fuel, but a percentage for wear and future repair of the vehicle.
• Build a cash cushion for the off-season out of the summer peak — winter brings fewer jobs, but wages and rent don't stop.

On a related note — if you're troubled less by the margin of a single move and more by money being there on paper but not in the account, read Haulage: the trucks keep rolling but the cash is gone — where the gap comes from. And to look at profit more broadly — across types of move, districts and lead channels together — see The margin of every direction, location and channel.

«Profit in moving isn't where there are more jobs. It's where the truck doesn't drive across the whole city empty for a cheap studio.»

«A loss-making move doesn't shout. It quietly rides along with the profitable ones while you think the jobs have grown in number.»

Money Doesn't Disappear. You Just Don't See It.

The profit in your moving company doesn't vanish. It dissolves into the cheap, distant and hard jobs you haul at a loss, and into crew downtime you don't see behind the number of runs. Work out the margin per move and per crew — and the picture becomes obvious in a single evening. Finmap shows income by type of move and by crew, direct costs kept separate, the margin of every job and a payment calendar, so you can see who feeds you and who eats you. Try it free for 14 days and look at your moves in a new light.