Reading a rental P&L: revenue per car, cost per kilometre

Total revenue is a vanity metric. A ten-car fleet doing ₨20 lakh a month tells you nothing if five cars earn ₨18 lakh and five cars earn ₨2 lakh.

Revenue per car. Divide each car's rental revenue by the number of days it was in the fleet. Below ₨4,000/day for a sedan in Karachi, you have a problem. Either the car is not being rented, or it is being rented at yesterday's rate.

Cost per kilometre. Sum fuel, maintenance, wash, minor repair — divide by kilometres covered that month. A well-maintained sedan is ₨15–18 per km. Anything above ₨25 and the car is telling you something: replace tyres, investigate an oil-burn problem, or retire it.

Owner payout as a share of revenue. If you average 70% paid to owners and your remaining 30% is chewed up by ops and overhead, you have no room for surprise. Shift to 65/35 or stop taking on new cars on the current split.

Outstanding customer balance. The money customers owe you after walking out the door. If it's above 10% of monthly revenue, your receipt discipline is loose. Tighten it now before it's 25%.

Each of these is one SQL query if you have structured data. Most operators don't — rents, receipts and payouts live in disconnected notebooks. A per-car P&L report that rolls up all four numbers from rent agreements + receipts + owner-payment entries is exactly the kind of thing software pays for itself on.