Across the heavy truck industry, 2026 is shaping up as a stress test, not a reset for dealership finance and fixed operations leaders.
Freight rates remain soft, order boards are thinner, and commercial truck sales are sliding instead of climbing. The September 2025 ATD Truck Beat reports heavy duty sales down 25.6 percent year-over-year and nearly 10 percent year-to-date.
At the same time, a new round of Section 232 tariffs is pushing equipment and parts costs higher. An October 2025 White House fact sheet outlines a 25 percent duty on imported medium and heavy duty trucks and many truck parts, and a 10 percent duty on imported buses, effective November 1.
Analysts at ACT Research describe the environment as an extended correction. Freight and rates are not expected to feel healthy again until late 2026, and fleets are already stretching asset life and protecting cash.
In this context, 2026 tests how well heavy truck dealers understand their costs, protect parts margin, and manage cash. External forces cannot be controlled, but the quality of data and decisions inside the dealership can.
A few macro trends frame the decisions dealers face.
Freight and truck demand: slow grind rather than snap back
Freight volumes and rates have spent much of 2024 and 2025 in recession territory. ACT’s freight outlook points to a gradual, uneven recovery. Fleets are focused on utilization and liquidity instead of aggressive expansion.
For dealers, this shows up as fewer new units, older trucks staying in service longer, and greater reliance on fixed operations to carry performance.
Tariffs: cost that doesn't follow the budget cycle
The Section 232 action adjusts imports of medium and heavy-duty vehicles, parts, and buses. The White House fact sheet and a summary from STR Trade outline 25 percent tariffs on most imported Class 3 through 8 trucks and many truck parts, and 10 percent on buses.
These duties layer on top of earlier metal tariffs and elevated logistics costs. Analysts expect them to weigh on equipment demand in 2026 and raise baseline costs for fleets and dealers.
CFO sentiment: higher costs, cautious investment
The Richmond Fed’s CFO Survey finds that firms attribute close to 40 percent of total unit cost growth in 2025 and 2026 to tariffs and tariff-related uncertainty. Many finance leaders are delaying capital projects and placing more emphasis on productivity and working capital.
Heavy truck dealerships reflect that reality. Budgets are tighter, new investments receive more scrutiny, and finance teams are expected to do more with the same headcount. Those macro forces show up quickly at the parts counter, in the service bay, and inside accounts payable.
Those headline trends translate into specific pressures on parts, service, and accounts payable.
Parts: cost creep and relationship pressure
Tariffs and inflation appear on parts invoices as:
Parts managers must protect gross profit while preserving long-standing customer relationships.
Experiences during the chip shortage offered a preview. When chips were scarce, trucks waited on lots and customers often blamed the dealer. Stores with access to uptime-critical inventory sometimes became suppliers to neighboring dealers, creating a new revenue stream. Control over key parts translated directly into pricing power.
Tariffs are not the same as a shortage event, yet the lesson is similar. Dealers that understand where tariff pressure lands and plan stocking and pricing accordingly are better positioned than those reacting invoice to invoice.
Service: more uptime expectations, less room on the RO
Service departments face more complex repairs on aging equipment and customers who question every line on the repair order.
Service advisors are often the ones sitting with a fleet manager, walking through a repair order and explaining why a part costs more this month than it did last quarter.
To customers, that can sound like dealer markup, even when the underlying cause is a 25 percent import duty upstream. Clear internal data helps service teams explain price changes in a way that protects trust.
AP and finance: where every pressure converges
All of this activity ultimately flows through accounts payable and finance.
AP teams now work with vendor invoices that blend base cost, tariff and duty lines, fuel and freight surcharges, and discounts or rebates.
These invoices are often scattered across email inboxes, shared drives, SharePoint folders, and DMS screens. Approvals move through informal channels. Matching takes place across multiple rooftops with limited visibility into landed cost per part, vendor, or branch.
Controllers are expected to answer questions like:
Slow approvals add another drag. Invoices sit in limbo, statements do not clear, finance fees accumulate, and misapplied sales tax builds over time. In a tight margin year, those leaks are increasingly visible. Against that backdrop, finance leaders in heavy truck dealerships benefit from a focused set of steps to regain control.
Responding to this environment doesn’t require perfect analytics. It calls for a small set of practical moves that make the picture clearer and decisions easier.
Move 1: Turn AP and DMS data into a simple “tariff and trend” view
A practical first move is to assemble a basic view, using existing systems, that covers 2025 into 2026 and shows:
The ATD Commercial Truck Dealer financial profile provides useful benchmarks for fixed operations performance. Comparing internal trends to industry norms helps dealers see whether they are outliers or tracking with broader market shifts.
The goal is clarity, not perfection. Even a straightforward report can support better decisions about pricing, stocking, and vendor negotiations.
Move 2: Align parts, service, and finance on a pricing stance
Controllers, AP managers, parts managers, and service managers benefit from reviewing the same data and agreeing on a clear stance for 2026:
Industry context strengthens those conversations. ATA’s American Trucking Trends notes that trucks moved 11.27 billion tons of freight in 2024, down from 11.41 billion the prior year. That decline underscores the pressure fleets feel and helps frame pricing discussions as a shared response to market conditions rather than a dealer-specific issue.
Move 3: Treat inventory and payables as working capital levers
A third move is to treat inventory and AP as active levers for working capital instead of back-office chores.
Using AP and DMS data, dealers can see:
When purchasing and AP teams review the same information, it becomes easier to keep critical parts in stock, free up cash from the wrong inventory, and avoid year-end surprises.
For many dealerships, the challenge is not knowing what to do next, but having data and processes that make those steps hard to execute. AP automation is one of the most practical ways to remove that friction.
These moves become significantly easier when AP processes aren’t fragmented.
Freeing AP to contribute to strategy
AP teams have early visibility into how tariffs, fees, and taxes show up on invoices. When those teams spend most of their time chasing approvals or rekeying data, that insight is lost.
With connected workflows and automation, AP teams can:
In that model, AP is positioned as a contributor to the 2026 plan rather than only an administrative function.
Using intelligent capture and matching to turn invoices into data
Modern invoice capture technology, combined with automated matching and workflows, brings invoice data, approvals, and payments together around dealer systems.
That approach allows AP teams to:
Approvers see all relevant information in one place, which reduces errors and shortens approval cycles.
Once invoices, approvals, and payments are held in a connected system, each invoice becomes a data point. Controllers and AP managers can track:
This information protects margin and cash while also providing operational metrics that support continuous improvement. In a tariff-heavy, low-margin environment, that kind of visibility and discipline is one of the few levers dealerships can still control.
Most forecasts point to a slow grind through 2026, with a healthier freight and truck market closer to 2027. Tariffs and policy shifts are likely to remain part of the landscape.
Heavy truck dealers cannot afford blind spots under those conditions. Untracked tariff surcharges and freight fees erode parts margin. Misapplied sales tax adds up over hundreds of invoices. Slow, fragmented approvals weaken purchasing power and strain relationships with vendors and fleets.
Dealers that emerge from 2026 in a stronger position will focus on three levers they can influence:
To support that shift, the article "2026 Dealership Technology Trends That Drive Efficiency and Control" highlights how heavy truck dealerships are using their DMS and automation investments to tighten control, simplify their technology stack, and give finance better visibility.
onPhase’s AP automation platform helps turn those ideas into day-to-day practice by giving finance and AP teams clearer invoice, tariff, and cash data across every rooftop, even as tariffs and economic conditions continue to shift through 2026.