At Home Hardware Homecoming in Toronto this month, a dealer stopped by our booth and told me about her binder.
She keeps a section for each truck in her fleet. Oil changes, tires, brake jobs, the invoice for each one. She started it after her shop handed her a big bill for brakes on a truck that had brakes done the year before. She doesn't think anyone set out to cheat her. Her read is that the shop replaced parts to be safe instead of measuring what was there, and she paid for their caution.
She wasn't the only one with a story like that. Repair costs came up at our booth over and over. Owners told me the bills keep climbing and the work changes from one visit to the next, depending on who's on the bench that day.
The numbers support them. The American Transportation Research Institute found fleet repair and maintenance costs rose 8.6% in 2025, one of the biggest jumps of any line item in their annual cost report. That's U.S. highway data, but our trucks pull from the same parts supply and the same short list of technicians.
A busy shop sees hundreds of units a month. A technician pulls a wheel on your flatbed and finds no record of when the pads went on. Replacing them is the safe call for him. If he leaves them and something goes wrong, it comes back on the shop. If he replaces them, you pay and the shop moves on.
I don't blame the technician for that. He's working with no history on your truck.
Without your own records, you can't push back. You can't say, "Those pads went on 14 months ago at 22,000 km. Show me the measurement." So you sign the work order and move on. Do that across six or eight trucks for a few years and it adds up to real money.
A building centre lives on margin points. Say one delivery truck costs you $4,000 a year more in repairs than it should. At a 25% gross margin, you need $16,000 in extra sales to cover that one truck's overspend. Multiply by the fleet and you're looking at a good month of lumber sales handed to the shop.
Owners who would argue over a two-cent difference on a pallet of shingles will pay a $3,000 brake invoice without a second look. I understand why. Trucks aren't their business. But the money spends the same.
Over 40 years, I've noticed the fleets with the lowest repair costs have one thing in common. Somebody in the building owns the records, and the shop knows it.
You don't need software to do this. A binder works. So does a spreadsheet. For each truck, write down the date, the kilometres or engine hours, what the shop did, who did it, and what it cost. Keep the invoices behind it.
Then change how you deal with the shop. Ask them to write the measurements on the invoice, brake lining thickness and rotor condition, so you can see the parts were at their limit before they came off. Ask for the old parts back once in a while. A shop treats a customer who checks the work with more care.
Set a dollar line for second opinions. Anything over $2,500, you get a second quote or at least a phone call explaining the work before it starts. Most of the time the first shop is right. The phone call still keeps everybody honest.
Once you have a year of records, look at cost per kilometre by truck. One unit will stand out. Sometimes it's a driver habit, sometimes it's the wrong truck for the job, and sometimes it's a truck that has reached the point where fixing it costs more than replacing it. You can't make that call without the numbers.
For our Homecoming booth, we built a fleet cost tracker in Excel. It splits your fixed costs from your running costs, flags maintenance coming due, and runs a keep-or-replace calculation for each truck. Think of it as the binder with the math done for you.
If you'd like a copy, send me a note and I'll get it to you. And if the numbers tell you a truck has to go, I'm happy to talk through what should replace it.