Wednesday, 24 June 2026 UK SME Intelligence Get the weekly brief
Trades & services

Van and field-team profitability calculator

A van on the road only pays if the jobs cover the wage, the vehicle and the overhead. Enter your numbers to see the monthly revenue, cost and profit per van, and how many jobs a day you need just to break even.

The numbers per van

£
£

Gross monthly pay including on-costs.

£

Lease or finance, fuel, insurance, maintenance.

%
£

Share of office, admin, software and insurance.

How it works

Each van earns revenue from the jobs it completes: average jobs a day, multiplied by the average invoice value, multiplied by the working days in the month. Against that sit the costs of putting it on the road: the engineer's wage, the van itself, the materials used on jobs, and a share of the overhead that keeps the business running.

The profit is simply revenue minus those costs, and the margin shows what share of every pound of revenue you actually keep. The break-even figure works backwards: it is the number of jobs a day, at your current invoice value, that just covers the wage, the van and the overhead once materials are taken out.

How to use the result

Compare the break-even jobs per day with what each van really does in a normal week. If a van rarely beats break-even, the answer is usually one of three levers: more jobs a day through better routing and scheduling, a higher average invoice value, or lower fixed costs per van. Run the same numbers for a busy month and a quiet one to see how much slack you have when work dries up.

A per-van estimate to test the model. It excludes one-off costs, downtime, holidays and tax, and assumes steady work. Treating materials as a flat percentage of revenue is a simplification.

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