PATH 4.0
Do You Know What Every Job Really Costs?
Most logging businesses don't. PATH 4.0 gives you the answer—on your phone, even without cell service.
Use PATH 4.0 Free ↓ See why it matters
Most logging businesses don't. PATH 4.0 gives you the answer—on your phone, even without cell service.
Use PATH 4.0 Free ↓ See why it mattersYou know your gross revenue. You know your stumpage checks. But do you know your true cost of production—by job, by week, by year? Do you know your return on investment?
Most operators don't—and it's costing them. Without real financial data on each job, you can't tell a good job from a bad one until it's too late.
Full days, full trucks, full schedule—but at year end the profit doesn't match the effort. The problem isn't how hard you work. It's which costs you can't see.
Without knowing your real costs, real profit, and real ROI, every job estimate is a guess. Some jobs look great on gross revenue and bleed you on net. You won't know until you're deep in.
Should you repair or replace? Add a machine or run leaner? Without knowing your true operating costs, depreciation, and ROI, every capital decision is a gamble.
Your actual costs, your real profit, and your return on investment—by week, by year, and most importantly, for each individual job—are the numbers that tell you whether your business is working.
Without them, every decision is a guess. With them, you can price jobs with confidence, compare one job against another, and answer the question every logging business owner needs answered: is this job worth doing?
PATH 4.0 calculates all of it—costs, profit, and ROI—for any time frame, any job, any scenario you want to run.
PATH walks you through a structured process to build your cost picture from the ground up.
Insurance, repairs, office, vehicles, supplies—the annual cost of keeping your business alive whether you produce or not. Your tax return has most of these numbers.
Equipment values, loans, payroll, fuel, and weeks of production. PATH calculates your weekly depreciation, compares it to your payments, and picks the higher of the two—giving you a conservative, honest cost picture.
List what you produce and what you net per load—gross price minus stumpage minus trucking. The money that actually stays with your business.
Select a time frame—one week, a whole job, or a full year. Enter production. See your profit or loss and your return on investment, side by side.
The built-in scenario engine that lets you ask "what if?" and get an answer in seconds.
Once your baseline numbers are in place, PATHWAYS puts slider controls on the variables that move your bottom line—fuel price, production rate, payroll, overhead. Drag a slider and watch your profit and ROI recalculate in real time.
No spreadsheets. No formulas. No guesswork. You change a variable, you see the result—instantly.
Diesel jumped 40 cents? Slide it and see exactly how it hits your costs, profit, and ROI.
What if you ran one more load per day? Or lost two weeks to mud season? See the P&L shift before it happens.
Thinking about adding a crew member? Weighing a new insurance quote? Model the impact before you commit.
Run the same cost structure against different jobs. Some that look great on gross revenue look very different when you see the net.
Open the link. Save to your home screen. It works like a native app—iPhone or Android.
After your first visit, PATH runs entirely on your device. Use it on a landing in the middle of nowhere.
No account. No login. No data collection. Your numbers are stored on your device and nowhere else.
PATH 4.0 is a free tool from Northeast Forests LLC. No ads, no upsell walls, no subscription.
PATH 4.0 is powerful. But the app is only as good as the numbers you put into it.
That means you still have to gather your own crew-level costs, enter your own production assumptions, organize your own job information, and figure out how to turn those numbers into better business decisions.
That's where PATH 4.+ comes in.
PATH 4.+ is a custom version of PATH built around your logging business. Instead of starting with a blank general tool, you get a ready-to-use version set up for your crew, your machines, your costs, your production, and the decisions you actually have to make.
Your actual overhead, equipment values, depreciation, payroll, and fuel—entered correctly and verified, so you can trust the output from day one.
Multiple crews? Different equipment packages? PATH 4.+ is configured for your specific operation, not a generic template.
Your actual product mix, your mills, your net-per-load numbers—based on your settlement sheets, not guesswork.
Custom PATHWAYS scenarios tuned to the variables that actually matter for your business—not generic sliders.
At the highest level, PATH 4.+ becomes a searchable database of your jobs—compare performance across seasons, tracts, and crews. Spot patterns. Understand what is really paying.
PATH 4.0 helps you calculate.
PATH 4.+ helps you decide.
PATH is built and maintained by Northeast Forests LLC, a forestry and forest products industry consulting and de facto forestry extension organization. PATH applies throughput accounting principles to logging operations, helping business owners see past gross revenue to the metrics that actually determine whether a job is worth doing.
PATH has been in use across the logging industry in various forms since its original spreadsheet version. PATH 4.0 is a complete ground-up rebuild as a modern mobile app.
PATH 4.0 is free, runs on your phone, and works offline. Set it up in 10 minutes.
Use PATH 4.0 Free