Year-End Financial Review Checklist for Moving Companies

December is the slowest month in the moving calendar for most of the country. Phones are quiet, crews are light, and the temptation is to coast into the new year. Resist it.

This is the best month you'll have all year to sit down with your numbers and understand what actually happened in your business over the past twelve months. Not what you think happened — what the data says happened. The companies that do this year-end review consistently make better decisions in January than the ones that wing it.

Here's a structured checklist. Block four hours, close your office door, and work through it.

Revenue Analysis

Start with the top line and work down.

Total revenue vs. prior year. Pull your total revenue for the year and compare it to last year. Did you grow? By how much? If revenue increased 15% but you added a truck and two crew members, your growth might not be as profitable as it appears.

Revenue by service type. Break your revenue into categories: local residential, long-distance, commercial, packing services, storage, and any specialty services (piano, fine art, etc.). Which categories grew? Which shrank? This tells you where demand is heading and where your marketing should focus next year.

Revenue by month. Chart your monthly revenue. Identify your peak months and your troughs. Calculate what percentage of annual revenue came from June-August. If it's over 65%, you have a dangerous seasonal concentration. Consider strategies to flatten the curve: commercial moves, corporate relocation partnerships, and winter promotions for flexible-date customers.

Revenue per truck per month. Divide monthly revenue by the number of active trucks. This metric tells you how efficiently you're utilizing your fleet. If one truck is consistently producing 40% less revenue than the others, something is wrong — routing inefficiency, crew productivity, or maintenance downtime.

Average job value. Total revenue divided by total jobs. Compare to last year. If average job value declined while total revenue grew, you moved more stuff for less money per job — which usually means you're taking lower-quality work to fill capacity. That's a pricing problem.

Expense Review

Revenue is vanity; profit is sanity.

Labor cost as percentage of revenue. For most moving companies, labor (including crew wages, payroll taxes, workers' comp, and benefits) should fall between 40-55% of revenue. If you're above 55%, you're either overstaffed, underpaying, or underpricing. If you're below 40%, verify your crews are being compensated fairly — underpaid crews produce higher turnover and damage rates.

Fuel costs. Pull your total fuel spend and calculate cost per job and cost per mile. Compare to last year. Fuel prices fluctuate, but your cost per mile should be trending down if you're improving route efficiency. If it's trending up despite stable fuel prices, look at your dispatch routing.

Vehicle maintenance and repair. Total spend, broken down by vehicle if possible. Identify any trucks that are becoming money pits. A truck requiring $8,000+ in annual repairs beyond routine maintenance is probably due for replacement. Calculate the break-even point: at what repair cost does a new truck payment become cheaper?

Insurance premiums. Compare this year's premiums to last year's. If they increased, understand why — claims history, fleet size changes, coverage modifications, or market-wide increases. If your claims frequency drove the increase, that's an operational problem disguised as an insurance problem.

Marketing spend by channel. Break your marketing costs into channels: Google Ads, Yelp, local SEO, referral programs, direct mail, lead aggregators. Calculate cost per lead and cost per booked job for each channel. Kill or reduce channels where cost per booked job exceeds 10-12% of the average job value. Double down on channels with the lowest cost per acquisition.

Overhead. Rent, utilities, office staff, software subscriptions, phone systems, professional services (accounting, legal). Look for subscriptions you're paying for but not using — they accumulate over the year.

Accounts Receivable Cleanup

Outstanding invoices. Pull a report of all unpaid invoices. Anything over 90 days is unlikely to be collected through normal channels. Decide now: pursue through collections, write off, or make one final attempt.

Payment terms analysis. What's your average days-to-payment? If customers are taking 30-45 days to pay on net-15 terms, your payment collection process needs tightening. Consider requiring credit card on file for all bookings or collecting full payment at delivery.

Good accounting tools integrated with your moving software eliminate the manual reconciliation that makes this process painful. When your invoicing, payments, and job data live in the same system, generating an AR aging report takes seconds instead of hours.

Tax Preparation

Get ahead of your CPA by organizing these items now:

• Depreciation schedules for all vehicles and equipment. Verify that assets disposed of during the year are removed from the schedule.
• Mileage logs for any vehicles used for both business and personal purposes.
• Receipts and documentation for any deductions you plan to claim — equipment purchases, training expenses, professional development, trade show attendance.
• 1099 preparation for any independent contractors paid $600 or more during the year. These are due to recipients by January 31.
• Payroll records — Verify W-2 information is accurate for all employees before your payroll provider generates the forms.
• Sales tax obligations — If your state requires sales tax on moving services (rules vary significantly by state), verify that you've collected and remitted correctly for all four quarters.

If you haven't been tracking these items throughout the year, this is going to be painful. Build a system now so next December isn't the same scramble.

Key Performance Indicators to Set for Next Year

Use this year's data to set specific, measurable targets:

Close rate target. If you converted 30% of leads this year, target 35% next year. Identify the specific actions that will close that gap — faster follow-up, better estimates, sales training.

Revenue per employee. Total revenue divided by total full-time-equivalent employees. This is your productivity metric. Set a target to increase it by 5-10% through better scheduling, routing, and technology adoption.

Damage claim rate. Number of claims filed divided by total jobs. Industry average is roughly 3-5% for well-run operations. If you're above 5%, invest in crew training and better materials.

Customer acquisition cost. Total marketing and sales expense divided by total new customers. This number should decrease year over year as your reputation and referral base grow.

A solid reporting platform makes tracking these KPIs automatic rather than manual. When you can pull these numbers in real time, you make adjustments in February instead of discovering problems in December.

Planning the Year Ahead

With your review complete, you now have data-driven answers to the strategic questions:

• Should you add a truck? (Only if revenue per truck is high and you're turning away work)
• Should you hire another salesperson? (Only if lead volume exceeds current capacity and close rate is healthy)
• Should you raise prices? (Yes, if your margins shrank despite revenue growth)
• Should you cut a marketing channel? (Yes, if cost per acquisition exceeds your threshold)

These decisions made with data are dramatically better than the same decisions made on gut instinct.

Don't Let December Go to Waste

The slow season is a gift. Use it. Four hours with your financials now will save you from bad decisions all year.

Elromco's integrated accounting and reporting tools give moving company owners real-time visibility into every metric covered in this checklist — no spreadsheet reconciliation required. If your year-end review revealed that you're flying blind on your numbers, that's the first problem to fix in January.