← Propane delivery route margin calculator
Names no specific product or company — this compares a free calculator against the generic method most independent propane dealers already use: a personal or shared spreadsheet with a margin formula typed in once and copied down for every customer.
| Question | Spreadsheet formula | This calculator |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum-delivery fee threshold | A manual IF formula per row, easy to leave off a new customer or get backwards (charged when it should not be, or the reverse) | Applies the threshold the same way on every customer, and states plainly whether it triggered |
| Deliveries per year from fill size | An extra column you have to add and keep dividing correctly as fill size changes | Computed automatically from annual gallons ÷ average fill size |
| Fixed monthly cost per customer | Often folded invisibly into "the price per gallon" instead of tracked on its own | Tank rental and hazmat compliance cost are separate line items, every time |
| Whole-route income check | A second sheet or a manual sum, often not kept in sync with the per-customer tab | Built in — enter each customer's monthly profit and see the route total against your income goal |
| History across customers and seasons | Its actual strength — a running log with address, tank ownership, and delivery history | Prices one customer at a time; does not replace a customer log |
| Shareable single scenario | Requires sending the whole file or a screenshot | One link, via "Copy shareable link," with no file attached |
Neither tool determines your retail price, your wholesale cost, or how much propane a tank needs — both are arithmetic on numbers you already have, and both are only as accurate as the figures you type in.
Plenty of small dealers do, and a spreadsheet is a fine tool for tracking a customer list over a season. The failure mode is not the spreadsheet itself — it is the minimum-delivery-fee threshold, which is a conditional (does this fill size trigger the fee, yes or no) that a copied-down formula has to re-implement correctly for every row, and easy to get wrong once for a new customer with an unusual fill size. A calculator that re-evaluates the condition on every input avoids that particular drift; a spreadsheet formula copied down a column does not check itself.
Not necessarily. This tool prices one customer at a time and does not save a running list across sessions the way a spreadsheet's rows do. Many small dealers use both: this calculator to get one customer's arithmetic right, including the minimum-delivery-fee edge case, and their own spreadsheet to log the result alongside address, tank ownership, and delivery history for every customer over a season.