The one-line answer
MapLedger maps any carrier's general ledger to the FreightMath Standard COA — 550 accounts, 5 operating groups, 7 labor groups — without requiring the carrier to change a thing in their own chart. Onboarding takes about four weeks from kickoff to live dashboards.
Why standardization is the whole game
Two trucking companies running comparable freight can publish wildly different operating ratios — not because their economics are different, but because their charts of accounts are. One classifies driver benefits in payroll; another spreads them across wages, fuel, and G&A. One puts owner-operator settlements above the line; another below. Without a common chart, peer comparison is fiction.
MapLedger fixes this by establishing one canonical chart — and translating every carrier's unique GL into it.
The Standard COA, by the numbers
| Dimension | Detail |
|---|---|
| Accounts | 550 standardized accounts |
| Categories | 4xxx Revenue · 5xxx Direct Operating · 6xxx Equipment & Insurance · 7xxx Overhead · 9xxx Statistics |
| Operating Groups | OTR (100) · Local (200) · Dedicated (300) · Brokerage (400) · General (000) |
| Labor Groups | Company Driver (100) · Owner Operator (200) · Lease Purchase (300) · Brokerage (400) · Non-Driver (500) · Maintenance (600) · General (000) |
| Account format | Category – Operating Group – Labor Group (e.g. 5100-100-100 = Fuel · OTR · Company Driver) |
That three-segment account number is the trust layer for everything downstream — FreightMath OR, FreightMarks benchmarks, Quality of Freight scoring, BidRight pricing.
The four-week onboarding
Week 1 — Data Integration
KSMTA's standardized TMS extract package runs against your transportation management system (asset and non-asset separately). At the same time, the prior 12 months of trial balance data flow in via Excel.
Week 2 — Mapping
Every line in your GL is reviewed and mapped to the appropriate Standard COA account. Most lines map directly. The ones that don't — the catch-all "Other Operating Expense" buckets every carrier has — get allocated using either Ratio Allocation (preferred — split by operating statistics like dispatch miles or tractor counts) or Percentage Allocation (a fixed split when no measurable driver exists).
Week 3 — Calibration
The FreightMath ABC engine runs against the mapped GL. Cost-per-mile, cost-per-hour, and other operating metrics are validated against what management knows to be true. Adjustments to allocation logic are made where the model disagrees with reality.
Week 4 — Go-Live
First period review. Dashboards published. Your team is trained on the Home page, Profitability Matrix, Areas of Profit, and the rest of the FreightMath dashboard sequence. From here on, every monthly close flows through MapLedger automatically.
What you keep, what you gain
You keep your own chart of accounts exactly as it is. You gain:
- Peer comparison that means something (FreightMarks benchmarks by operating mode and labor group)
- Load-level cost-to-serve that ties back to a specific GL account
- A defensible audit trail from a single load all the way to the trial balance
That's the whole MapLedger pitch. No black box, no fragile spreadsheet, no accounting overhaul.