Most brokerage owners run the business from a stack of spreadsheets that never quite line up — margin in one, the rep payout in another, AR aging in a third. The executive scorecard is the antidote: one screen with the headline metric from every pillar — load margin, agent economics, lane and customer profitability, carrier cost, and cash cycle — for the whole company, plus a one-row-per-branch matrix that ranks every branch on the same measures.
What this report answers
What's the company's blended margin, total loads, margin per load, net house take after commissions, and cash gap — all at once? And how does each branch stack up on margin %, margin per load, loads per rep, top-customer concentration, carrier cost %, and days-to-collect? The Branch Scorecard page carries the company KPIs and the one-row-per-branch matrix with conditional formatting on the worst-margin and most-concentrated branch; the Branch Comparison page charts margin and the volume-versus-margin-per-load trade-off across branches and flags branches under working-capital strain.
The metrics that matter
Every comparison metric is a rate or a per-unit figure — Blended Gross Margin % and Carrier Cost % are SUM/SUM, Margin per Load and Loads per Rep are per-unit, Cash Gap is the difference of two SUM/SUM ratios — so a large branch and a small one compare on the same footing. Net Margin After Commission is the truth line at the company level, and the per-branch Top Customer Share and Cash Gap columns surface the concentration and working-capital risks that a margin number alone hides.
Why the data is trapped
This scorecard is every other report in this set, condensed — which is exactly why it's so hard to build by hand. Margin comes from the TMS, commissions from the payout sheet, AR and AP from QuickBooks, and rolling all of it up per branch into a single comparable matrix is a multi-system join no native report performs. Owners end up assembling it manually each week, if at all. This template models the branch roll-up and computes every pillar's headline metric in one place.
How to read it
Read the company KPIs top to bottom as a chain: loads and revenue (are we producing), margin % and margin per load (are we keeping enough), net after commission (what the house actually takes), and cash gap (can we fund it). Then read down the branch matrix: a branch that lags the others on one metric is a targeted coaching fix, not a company-wide problem — and the gap between the best and worst branch is usually the biggest, most addressable opportunity in the business. The sample on this page uses entirely synthetic data — generic labels and made-up dollar figures, no real loads, carriers, or customers.
Metrics it tracks
| Metric | What it means |
|---|---|
| Total Gross Margin $ | Gross margin dollars across all branches. |
| Blended Gross Margin % | Total margin ÷ total revenue (SUM/SUM) — the company headline rate. |
| Total Loads | Count of delivered loads across all branches. |
| Margin per Load | Total margin ÷ load count — company-wide average margin per load. |
| Net Margin After Commission | Gross margin minus commission across all branches — the house take. |
| Cash Gap (DSO - DPO) | Dollar-weighted days-to-collect minus days-to-pay, company-wide — the net days floated; both halves are SUM/SUM. |
Used by: Multi-branch and multi-team brokerage owners, regional managers
Frequently asked questions
What KPIs should a freight brokerage owner track weekly?
The headline set spans every pillar: blended gross margin % and margin per load (load margin), loads per rep and net margin after commission (agent economics), top-customer share (concentration), carrier cost % of revenue (buy-rate), and the cash gap (working capital). The executive scorecard puts all of them on one screen and compares them across branches.
How do I compare branches fairly when they're different sizes?
Use rate and per-unit metrics — gross margin %, carrier cost %, margin per load, loads per rep, cash gap — rather than raw dollar totals, so a large branch and a small one sit on the same footing. The scorecard's one-row-per-branch matrix is built around those normalized measures for exactly that reason.
Can I build this on my own multi-branch data?
Yes. Export your loads tagged by branch and rep with revenue and carrier cost from your TMS, plus commissions and AR/AP from QuickBooks, and use this as a template — we model it into a one-row-per-branch Power BI scorecard. The sample uses synthetic data, so there are no real branches or figures in what you see here.
Build this report on your own data
Clone this Freight brokerages template — describe it and we’ll generate sample data so you can try it free, or upload your own export. You get a fully modeled, branded Power BI project that opens in Power BI Desktop.
Use this as a template →