What Do Paper Tickets
Actually Cost You?

Where the Money Actually Goes

Nobody budgets for paper tickets, because the cost never arrives as a bill. It arrives as two quieter things:

• The ticket that never becomes an invoice. It stayed in a truck door, went through a wash cycle, or turned up three weeks late when the customer had already closed the job. The trucks ran all day. The revenue didn't follow.
• The hours spent typing. Someone reads a smudged ticket, keys it into the accounting system, and files the paper. At 6–10 tickets an hour, a busy month is most of a working week.
• Vendor tickets, counted twice. When a subcontractor hauls for you, the same ticket gets handled once to bill your customer and once to check what the hauler invoiced you. Two passes, two chances to lose it.
• The month-end scramble. Chasing missing tickets is the reason invoicing slips from the day the job ended to the end of the month — and getting paid slips with it.

The Assumptions, In Plain Sight

This calculator is deliberately simple arithmetic, and every number in it is one you can change:

• A ticket is one truck's day, start to finish — every round it hauls, tracked from dispatch to a ready-to-send invoice. It is not one load: a truck running six rounds in a day still comes back with a single ticket.
• Invoicing cost = passes through the office ÷ tickets per hour × your bookkeeper's rate. Own-driver tickets are one pass; vendor tickets are two.
• Lost-ticket cost = tickets per month × your loss rate × the average value of a ticket.
• Tragget's side is costed at $1.15 a ticket — the same figure we publish on our pricing page.

Set the vendor share to zero and leave the rest at their starting values — 125 tickets, 8 tickets an hour, $40 an hour, $900 a ticket, 0.5% lost — and you get $9.50 a ticket, or about $1,044 a month saved. That is exactly the worked example on our pricing page, and it is the reason those are the defaults here: the calculator and our published numbers are the same arithmetic.

What this calculator does not count: getting paid roughly 30 days sooner because the invoice goes out the day the job ends. That is worth real money too, and we work it out separately on the pricing page. The figure above is just the paper.

What Changes With Tragget

The driver logs each load on the phone he already carries, the day's ticket is timestamped and attached to the job before he pulls off the site, and the invoice is ready to send when the day ends. There is no stack to key in, and there is no ticket to lose — which is why both halves of the number above shrink at once.