Your Truck Stock Is Costing You More Than You Think

I didn't start thinking hard about truck stock until October 2008. Two builder accounts went quiet the same week. Receivables stretched from 45 days to 110. I had six trucks and twelve guys and I needed to know how long I could pay everyone with nothing new coming in. So I started looking for every dollar I could find.

Truck stock doesn't show up on most guys' radar in that kind of audit. It should.

Everything on your truck was cash when you bought it. Now it's inventory. Inventory doesn't make payroll.

The Van Gets Loaded Once and Never Gets Unloaded

The instinct makes sense. You get caught without a ball valve on a job, you throw four on the truck. Run short on expansion tanks, you add six. Braided supply lines in three sizes, PRVs, fittings you haven't pulled in eight months — because you never know. The embarrassment of the second supply house run is real. But that reflex is getting billed back to your business every single day, and almost nobody sits down to add up what it actually costs.

The sticker price of what's on your truck is the starting point, not the full number.

Add what you spent that isn't in your operating account anymore. Add obsolescence — I had parts for product lines I'd stopped installing two years earlier sitting in zip-lock bags with a tech's handwriting from 2007. Add the job-costing bleed: a tech pulls a $14 expansion tank off the truck, doesn't write it on the ticket because he's moving fast and the customer's waiting. That's not a rounding error. That's the margin on the call. Multiply it across twelve guys over two years and you'd sit down.

Then add shrinkage. I'll come back to that.

Most guys have never added this up. They haven't. Go count — not an estimate, a count. Assign a cost to what's on the trucks and figure out how many days of payroll it represents. When I finally did this in 2009 with three trucks left, I was genuinely surprised by the number. Not pleasantly.

What I Found When I Actually Pulled Everything Out

It was 2009. Three trucks. Service-only work — the builder accounts were gone and I was scratching for every residential call I could find. I needed to know exactly what I had because I couldn't afford to buy anything I already owned.

So I did what I should have done in 2006. I pulled everything out of the vans. Photographed it. Made a list. Priced it at what I'd paid, not what I'd charge — I wanted to know my money.

More than $4,000 in stock I could not account for. Couldn't tie it to a purchase order. Couldn't tie it to a job. Some of it was honest — fittings pulled on calls that didn't make the ticket when we were moving fast. Some of it was dead stock from a product line I'd walked away from two years earlier.

And some of it walked. Which I couldn't prove and couldn't deny.

Here's what kept me up. Not the four thousand dollars specifically, though four thousand dollars in 2009 was real money. It was that I had no system, so I couldn't tell an honest omission from a slow bleed. They looked the same. You can tighten ticketing habits to fix the job-costing slop. You can fix shrinkage with documentation and a direct conversation with a specific tech. But you can't fix either one if you can't tell them apart.

A Full Van Is Not a Sign of a Well-Run Shop

The trade treats a loaded van like a professional credential. I held that belief too, for a long time. Then I asked myself when I'd last built that stock list from scratch.

Most lists were assembled once — when the shop opened, or when a tech got their first van — and they've been running on autopilot since. Nobody sat down last year and asked what we actually pull. Whether the call mix shifted. Whether we stopped doing oil-fired equipment three years ago and forgot to pull the nozzle assortment.

The list grows. It almost never shrinks.

This is the same thinking that drives one-truck shops to sign three-year ServiceTitan deals before they have the volume to justify the overhead. Spending against a fear instead of against what the numbers actually say. The fear is showing up somewhere without the part. But if you ran the math, two extra runs to Ferguson in a month might cost less than the cash you're tying up in parts that move twice a year.

Your supply house rep isn't going to tell you that. His job is to move product. The suggested order guide he hands you is a sales tool built around their inventory turns, not around your call mix. Same thing I've said about flat-rate pricing books: useful scaffolding for a year. After that, if you're still running someone else's numbers, you stopped thinking about your own business.

Nobody knows you do mostly water heaters in Worcester. You know that. Build the list from that.

Build the List From Your Own Calls, Not a Template

Pull your last twelve months of invoices. What do you pull on more than half your calls? That's your A-list. Set a reorder threshold — say, three units on hand — and when you hit it, you restock. Not when you run out. That discipline is what kills the emergency run without requiring you to carry eight of everything.

What covers most callbacks and the next tier of common work? That's your B-list. One or two on the truck, reviewed every quarter. If a B-item hasn't moved in three months, ask whether it belongs on the truck or on a shop shelf.

Everything else: if you can't tell me the last time you pulled it on a job, it comes off the truck.

Once a year, add up what's on your trucks at cost. I'd do it the same time I'd pull a receivables aging report. What's the total, what did it cost me, how long has it been sitting. That number isn't fixed — it shifts as your call mix changes, as product lines turn over, as you add or drop service types.

What to Do Monday

Pull everything out of one van. Not from memory — physically out. Photograph it. Make the list from what's actually there. Price it at your cost. Divide by your daily payroll. That's how many days of wages are riding around on that truck.

Do the same for every truck. Add them up. Decide if that's the right number for a business your size.

Then pick your top 20 parts — the things you pull every week without question. Write a reorder number next to each one. When you hit it, you order. This is not a software problem. A notebook and a marker. Tape it inside the cabinet door.

Check it in 90 days. Kill anything that didn't move.

The count takes a day. The A-list takes an hour if you know your own calls. The hard part isn't the work. The hard part is finding out what you've actually been carrying.

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Questions I Get on This

I run one truck and mostly service calls. How much stock do I actually need?

Enough to finish your five most common call types without a supply house run. Water heater parts, common valve and fitting sizes, supply lines, faucet repair assortment. If the list is built from your actual call history, one truck doing residential service doesn't need more than $1,500 to $2,000 in stock. Most guys are carrying double that, in parts they added after one bad day.

How do I handle job costing when a tech pulls parts off the truck?

Every part that comes off the truck goes on the ticket. Before a job is marked complete, the tech writes down every part used. No exceptions. One forgotten $14 expansion tank is a story. Twelve guys forgetting two parts per call across a year is a margin problem you'll spend months trying to find.

Is shrinkage just part of running a shop?

Some honest slippage happens — parts pulled in the middle of a busy call that don't make the ticket. That's a documentation problem. But you can't separate it from actual theft without a baseline. Run a count, build a list with quantities, recount quarterly. When something disappears faster than your jobs can account for, that's a conversation with a specific person, not a shrug. You call it cost of doing business when you have no system. When you have a system, it's a discrepancy with a name and you deal with it.

How often should I count?

Full count once a year. Pull everything, reconcile against the list, price the variance at cost. Spot-check your A-items quarterly — just enough to make sure reorder thresholds are holding. One afternoon per truck. If it takes longer, the list is too long.

Is there software worth buying for this?

For a one-to-three truck shop, no. Not as a standalone. If you're already in Jobber or Housecall Pro, check whether inventory is already in your plan before you buy anything else. A shared spreadsheet you actually update weekly beats an inventory module nobody touches. Don't buy software to solve a discipline problem.

When does a central storeroom make sense instead of stocking every truck separately?

Three or more trucks and a physical location with someone who can touch the stock daily. The case for it: you stop carrying duplicates, you get better pricing on consolidated orders, shrinkage is easier to track at one point than across four rolling ones. The case against moving too fast: somebody has to manage it, and in a small shop that person is usually you or your best tech. Get the per-truck lists clean first.