The Second Trip: The Four-Dollar Part That Costs You Eighty-Three.

Drive, park, wait at the counter, drive back, restart the job: 52 minutes, two people, fourteen miles. That's $82.88 — to fetch a part that often costs less than lunch. Twenty-two of those a month is $21,880 a year, and it doesn't even count the work you couldn't bill while it was happening.

How it works

• The Trip Cost — one return trip priced properly (crew time at the loaded rate plus real vehicle cost per mile), then the year of them. Count your runs for two weeks first; it's always more than the guess
• The Stock List — the items that actually cause your runs, with cash-tied-up and runs-prevented columns, the annual return, and the payback in weeks. The sample: $942 of stock prevents 70% of the trips and pays for itself in three weeks — and it's stock, not spend, because the money comes back the day you sell the part
• The Restock Rule — the dash tally sheet that writes your list better than any supplier's, the labeled bin with a marker line inside it, the one scheduled restock morning that replaces a dozen unplanned trips, the named person per truck (week three is where these systems die), and the quarterly re-cut that stops the rolling junk drawer

Built for

Plumbers · HVAC · electricians · handymen · mobile repair — anyone whose crew is on a first-name basis with the counter staff.

What you get

One .xlsx file, four tabs, instant download. Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice. No macros, no subscription. Swap the eight sample items for your trade's — the method is the product.