Watch this video to learn how to use the SLT Truck Costing Spreadsheet to help guide your lawn and landscape business to more profits!

Lawn and landscape business owners often under-estimate the cost of truck ownership. Underestimating the cost of your lawn trucks can destroy the profits of landscaping companies.

On the other hand, if you over-estimate the cost of your lawn trucks, you may have a hard time selling enough landscape work to help you become a wealthy landscaper. 

In either situation, landscapers are killing profits and making their lawn business difficult to grow.

We developed this lawn truck cost worksheet as a service to the lawn and landscape industry. This spreadsheet allows you to figure the acquisition cost, the ownership cost, the operating costs, the repair cost, and the replacement cost of commercial work trucks used in landscaping operations.

Super Lawn Technologies and Super Lawn Trucks do not assume any liability for the use of the free calculator spreadsheet. If you alter the spreadsheet or change formulas, you may get inaccurate results. Use at your risk.

The video explains step by step how to use this lawn truck cost spreadsheet. 

Profit Greatly,

Tony Bass, Founder-Super Lawn Technologies and Super Lawn Trucks

Below is a transcription of the audio from the above video:

Hello, it’s Tony Bass with Super Lawn Technologies.

I’m going to go over with you, today, a spreadsheet that we provide to our prospective clients.

It’s a spreadsheet that can help you calculate exactly how much it costs for your company to operate a landscaping truck, such as a Super Lawn Truck, per year and per hour of use.

So we’re going to go through-we’re gonna get started.

First, we enter the purchase price of the truck.

In this case I’m putting in $65,000.

I’m going to calculate that we’re going to finance this over a six-year period with a 6% interest rate to calculate, and we have a 10 year useful life and a salvage value of about $9000.

Well, that’ll work on a lot of trucks.

Not all of them, but on trucks with relatively few miles on them.

Let’s estimate that you have 225 work days per year and you work 10 hour days.

That will take you to about 22,500 lifetime hours on the truck.

You’ll have a lifetime cost for acquisition of $88,010.00.

It’ll cost you $3.91 an hour to purchase that vehicle  to own it, and in the pay for the carrying cost of financing.

Now let’s add some of the annualized operating expenses such as insurance.

Let’s figure that your insurance policy is $1500 a year.

It’s going to cost you $500 a year for a tag for that truck, and I’m going to plan on washing that truck every other week and will spend $30 for that when I do it.

So, I’m gonna put $720 in my budget for taking care of that vehicle and keep it looking good.

I’ve got an annualized cost of $1.21 to take care of these items and I’ve now got a total of $5.12 per hour to cover the operating cost of this vehicle.

Now we get down to the operating expenses.

That is, what’s it going to cost me based on how much I drive the vehicle and this is where a lot of companies will vary.

For the sake of this example, we’re going to calculate that the company is driving 12,000 miles per year.

We’re going to say that the vehicle is getting 12 miles per gallon.

And the price of fuel is $4 a gallon years, maybe more, maybe less, but stick with me here.

We’re going to say the oil change interval on the Isuzu NPR is 10,000 miles.

If you get a Fuso truck, it’s 18,000 miles, so there’s very there’s variations there.

The tire change interval-well, we see tires depending on how they’re how to structure operated lasting anywhere from, we’ll say, 25,000 miles to 40,000 miles.

I’ll use the lower number to be safe.

A set of tires-let’s just calculate $200 a tire.

There’s six of them on a truck-that’s $1200 for the cost of tires.

With the annualized cost for tires we’ve got a predicted operating cost now of $2.10 per hour to pay for the tires and the fuel.

Now we’re looking here at a total cost of $7.22 per operating hour-$7.22.

We want to add something to that for maintenance.

That is going to be incidental repairs and maintenance on the truck.

I always add a dollar an hour minimum to be safe.

I’m at $8.22 an hour.

So, an annualized budget to own, to operate all the carrying costs for this truck is $16,247 a year or $1,354 per month.

Now, this is a great exercise for you for almost every piece of equipment in your fleet, particularly your trucks, which are some of the most expensive pieces of equipment that you can own in a landscape company.

If you have any questions about this worksheet, give us a call.

Here you can find our company online at superlawntrucks.com.

You can request a copy of this worksheet from our website or just send us an email to sales@superlawntrucks.com.

Again, my name is Tony Bass.

I’m the founder and CEO of Super Lawn Trucks.

We appreciate you tuning in with us today and I hope you have a super day!