Rigbooks

For owner-operators of independent trucks, knowing your profit per mile is survival. Rigbooks is purpose-built accounting software for solo truckers who run their vehicle as a business and need to understand the real profitability of every load. Unlike generic bookkeeping tools like QuickBooks or Quicken, which were designed for households and salaried employees, Rigbooks starts from the trucking business model: your core metric is cost per mile, your income comes load by load, and your expenses span fuel, maintenance, insurance, permits, and dozens of other categories that a general ledger simply does not know how to track together. The software lets you enter your own costs, receipts, mileage, fuel, and shows you the bottom line on each haul.

Rigbooks has been around since 2010, built by Jason Forrest specifically for his parents' trucking business after years of watching his mother spend weeks at tax time trying to piece together papers and expenses from across the country. That real-world frustration shaped what the app does: it assumes you are on the road, trying to keep records while driving, and that you need to know your numbers month to month, not just at tax time when everything builds up into a backlog.

How It Handles Your Numbers

Rigbooks works entirely on manual entry. You enter your costs and receipts into the app, sorted by category and date, and you enter your load details, pickup and delivery points, rate, miles, to tie each expense and each income line back to the right trip. There is no bank sync, no credit card connection, no automatic pulling of transactions. For owner-operators who are paid in cash or via broker transfer and whose truck expenses come from fuel stops, repair shops, and toll plazas across multiple states, this manual model actually fits: the app's job is not to auto-import data but to organize what you already know and let you see the math.

Each load you haul gets its own record with pickup, delivery, miles, and rate information. Expenses attach to that load. The software calculates your profit per mile automatically, income minus all expenses, divided by miles driven including deadhead. This is the metric that separates a good load from one that just looks good on the rate confirmation. A big paycheck can still lose money after fuel and deadhead; Rigbooks shows you which ones actually pay.

The data lives on your device, there is no account, no cloud, no syncing across devices. The app works on any computer or smartphone and backs up your records continuously with SSL encryption. If your hard drive crashes or your phone is lost, your data is protected and can be restored.

The Workflow and What It Tracks

Rigbooks is built around the specific cost categories that trucking demands: fuel, maintenance and repairs, tolls, scales, insurance, and permits. It also tracks mileage at the federal and state level for the International Fuel Tax Agreement (IFTA), which applies to interstate trucking, and it imports the latest IFTA fuel tax rates automatically so you do not have to look them up. You can enter loads by the mile, by the item, by lump sum, or by weight, whatever your broker uses to quote you.

Receipts go straight in: snap a photo of a fuel receipt in the sleeper, and it attaches to the right load. You can also import receipts from email. The app organizes them by date and category automatically. At tax time, instead of a shoebox of receipts and a spreadsheet you do not trust, you run a report: categorized income and expenses, federal and state IFTA mileage, all the numbers an accountant needs in one export.

Profit and loss reports, expense summaries, and mileage reports are all one click away. Reports export to PDF or print, and they come out ready for your accountant or your records.

Pricing and the Free Trial

Rigbooks costs $19 a month. The company offers a free 30-day trial with no credit card required upfront, and they mean it, you can cancel anytime with a single click. There are no hidden signup fees, no termination fees, and no extra charges of any kind. If you are not satisfied at any point, they refund your money.

For owner-operators running multiple trucks, Rigbooks handles fleets of 10 or more vehicles. Pricing for fleets is custom; you call them at (888) 274-6053 to discuss rates and features. For solo operators, the $19/month flat rate is as transparent as it gets.

Mobile Access and Convenience

The app works on any computer and on any smartphone or tablet, with nothing to download or install beyond the app itself. All your data is available from anywhere, which matters when you are on the road and need to check a cost or log an expense from a truck stop at 2 a.m. You can export your data at any time in a standard format if you ever decide to leave, no lock-in.

The app's creator emphasizes that this is not for everyone. If you hand off all your bookkeeping to an accountant, you lose the daily insight into your own business numbers. If you only check your numbers once a year, you do not catch the trends, loading lanes that used to pay well but have slipped, or the profit hit from rising fuel costs. Rigbooks is for the owner-operator who wants to stay on top of the business side of trucking week to week.

Who It Fits and Who It Does Not

Rigbooks is for solo owner-operators and small fleets who run trucks as a real business and want to understand their economics. If you are comfortable with spreadsheets or pen-and-paper bookkeeping, you do not need it. If your business is simple, you haul the same lanes, your costs are predictable, and you do not need to analyze profitability by load, a simpler tool might do.

The constraint is manual entry. There is no magic: if you do not log your expenses, the app does not know about them. It will not catch a receipt you left in the truck or forgot about. The value is for truckers who are willing to spend a few minutes a week keeping their numbers current so they can see real-time profit per mile instead of guessing or scrambling at tax time.

The company has tracked over 54,000 loads and helped its users earn more than $96 million in trucking revenue. That is not a measure of Rigbooks' performance but of the owner-operators using it; it shows the scale of the trucking businesses it serves.

The Verdict

Rigbooks is a tool built by someone who lived the problem. It solves the specific pain of trucking accounting, the need to know cost per mile, the complexity of IFTA, the chaos of receipts on the road, better than generic software because it does not try to be generic. If you drive your own truck and want to know whether you are making money on each load, Rigbooks makes that clarity cheap and straightforward. The free trial costs nothing but time to set up, and the $19/month is returnable if you change your mind.