Moving company CFO services: profit is made in the schedule, not the truck

Crew utilization: paid hours versus billed hours

Movers pay crews portal to portal, but customers pay from arrival to done — and the space between those two clocks is where a busy company quietly loses its margin. Drive time between jobs, weather cancellations, half-booked weekday crews, and hours burned in the warehouse are all payroll with no invoice attached. We measure a simple weekly ratio, billed crew hours over paid crew hours, per crew, and manage the levers that move it: real minimum job charges, a travel-time policy that is actually enforced on the quote, and scheduling by geography so two jobs in Brampton do not bracket one in Oshawa.

The same report settles staffing arguments with arithmetic. A third crew is justified when the first two are consistently billed out, not when the phone feels busy — and in a business this seasonal, hiring one month too early costs a full month of unbilled payroll. Damage claims get the same treatment as payroll: a small accrual per job, funded as you go, so a busy season's breakage never lands as one ugly surprise in the fall.

Local versus long-distance: two different businesses

Local moves are metered — the clock runs and the customer carries most of the estimating risk. Long-distance moves are quoted — a fixed price against weight, cube, and distance, so a bad estimate is your loss, and the truck has to come home somehow. Pricing them with the same instincts is how movers win jobs that lose money:

On every completed long-distance job we compare estimated hours, weight, and cost to actuals, then feed the misses back into the next quote. Estimators improve fast once someone shows them the score.

Seasonal cash planning

Moving revenue peaks from late spring through early fall, and the companies that fail rarely fail in August — they fail in February, out of cash they earned six months earlier. Our answer is a rolling 13-week cash forecast maintained all year, with three rules attached. First, deposits are liabilities until the job runs, and the books must say so — spending September deposits on October payroll is how a cancellation becomes a crisis; our moving company bookkeeping service builds that treatment in. Second, HST and tax set-asides are funded weekly in season, because the remittances land in the slow months. Third, the winter plan is written in the summer: which crews stay, which are laid off with proper ROEs — mechanics on our moving company payroll page — and how much storage and small-job revenue carries the base costs.

Storage deserves its own line in the plan: it is the rare moving revenue that recurs monthly, and a warehouse that fills during the busy season quietly becomes the paycheque that covers January.

Fleet replacement, timed to the season

A truck should be replaced when its repair bills and its downtime risk together cost more than replacing it — and in this business the downtime side dominates, because a truck down in August does not cost a repair bill, it costs booked jobs and reviews. We track maintenance cost and days-down per truck, so the fleet ranks itself, and we time purchases for the off-season: winter is when sellers negotiate, financing can be arranged calmly, and a new truck can shake out its problems on small jobs instead of a fully booked Saturday. Whether to finance or lease is then a cash question we model against the forecast, not a tax question — the deduction timing differs, but reliability in peak season is the asset you are actually buying.

Companies running US moves take on a second layer — US DOT operating authority, fuel tax filings on qualifying trucks, and USD jobs that need FX handled properly. That side of the business lives on our cross-border tax page for moving companies.