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Free Consult →What this tool does
Enter billable and available hours, jobs completed, revenue, gross profit and callbacks for one technician or the whole crew. The calculator returns billable utilization, revenue and profit per hour, and the callback rate.
How to read the result
- The share of paid hours billed below roughly 60% usually means a dispatch problem.
- Revenue per available hour is the number that moves the business. Revenue per billable hour can look fine while half the day is unsold.
- A callback is paid twice: once to do the work and once to redo it, plus the job that did not get done that day.
- Compare technicians on profit per hour. The highest revenue technician is often the one giving away materials.
Questions we get asked
What is a good billable utilization?
Most field services businesses run 60% to 75% of available hours billable. Above that, quality and callbacks usually suffer.
Should drive time count as billable?
Only if the customer pays for it. Otherwise count it as available but unbilled, which is exactly the gap this calculator is meant to show.
How often should this be run?
Monthly, alongside the close, and per technician. Quarterly is too late to change a schedule.
What this measures
A technician costs the same whether the van is moving or not. This works out how much of a paid day turns into billable work, and what each point of that is worth in a year.
What to put in
- Hours paid in a week, including drive time and shop time.
- Hours actually billed to a customer.
- The rate billed, and the loaded cost of the technician.
- Number of technicians.
How to read the answer
Anything under about 60% billable usually points to routing or dispatch. Effort is usually not the cause.
A point of utilization across five technicians is worth more than a rate rise, and costs nothing to take.
Where it usually goes wrong
- Counting drive time as billable because the customer pays a trip fee.
- Using the salary in place of the loaded cost, which understates the gap by a quarter or more.
Questions this raises
If the hours are hard to pull because the field software and the books do not talk, that is a systems problem before it is a productivity one.
If you want this done for you
What happens next
Reading about it and having it done are different things. Here is exactly what happens if you want the second one.
- The call takes thirty minutesYou describe the business and where the numbers are letting you down. We give you an expert view of your situation, and what we would start with. There is no pitch deck.
- We look at the fileYou give us read access to the books as they are. We come back with what is wrong, what it will take to fix, and whether the answer is bookkeeping, controller work, or something else.
- We send a written scope and a priceIt lists what we do each month, what you get, the date it lands and the fee. We agree it before anything starts, and it does not change unless you agree.
- We take over the books and close the first monthWe set up access and systems and enter the opening balances. The first close lands on the date in the scope, and every one after it does too.