How to measure billed technician hours and bay occupancy

Keep four clocks and one repair-order identity

Measure paid attendance, active technician work, sold labor and bay occupation separately, then join them by repair order, technician and date. A vehicle can block a lift while its technician works elsewhere. Two people can work on one vehicle at once: add their person-hours, but count that vehicle's bay interval once. The owner service adviser in the linked case is not a third productive technician.

Sold hours are a billing quantity. They can come from an authorized flat-rate operation rather than the minutes actually spent doing it. FTC describes both estimated flat-rate and actual-time charging; ALLDATA distinguishes independent standard-time estimates from manufacturer warranty times. Choose the applicable operation, included work and authorization before entering the sale. A published guide time is not proof of actual efficiency. Billing basis; Labor-time definitions

Build the event register before calculating percentages

A stopwatch total without an order ID cannot explain which sale it produced. Give each pause one reason and use nonoverlapping states. Do not let the same technician log simultaneous full-time tasks on two vehicles. If a second technician assists, record that person's own session. Identify off-bay road tests separately; they use technician time even though the lift is free.

Check the software's actual definitions before exporting. Shopmonkey's service report excludes general time and unfinished clock sessions; its time log filters by clock-in date. Retain corrections and the original timestamps when repairing a missed clock-out. Missing entries are unresolved measurement gaps, not evidence of no work. Service report scope; Time-log cutoff

Reconcile a week of technician time

The following is a constructed week for the existing two-technician roster, with 80.0 paid hours. All clock time on the new work completed in this example falls inside this week; its matched sold quantity is 55.0 hours. The opening invoice carryover below belongs to earlier completed work and is excluded from this clock cohort. No row is a measured industry average.

Utilization multiplied by matched efficiency reproduces sold output per paid hour. Here efficiency exceeds unity because sold guide-time hours exceed their 44.0 actual person-hours. It does not mean employees worked more clock hours than they were paid. Including the 4.0 comeback hours would answer a different question about all job time; total active job time is 48.0 hours. Label that denominator rather than quietly switching it.

These are this article's definitions. Other dashboards may use productivity or efficiency differently. Shopmonkey's documented service-efficiency calculation is billed hours divided by tracked hours, but its report settings and exclusions still matter. Do not rank technicians until missing sessions, job mix, assistance and rework allocation are checked. Product-specific definition

Bridge completed work to invoiced work and realized rate

A weekly billing report can look better or worse merely because the service adviser closed orders on a different day. Keep a completion view for operations and an invoice view for billed sales, then reconcile them. Shopmonkey explicitly provides those two date modes. Money collected is a further event, so neither view by itself is a cash-receipts report. Completion and invoice dates

At the unchanged illustrative labor rate of $135 per sold hour and a separate assumed $168.00 labor discount, realized labor sales are $7,392.00. Dividing by 56.0 net invoice hours gives $132.00 per billed hour. Exclude parts, tax and other charges from that numerator. A flat-price labor operation with no recorded sold hours also needs its own flag; do not invent hours to make the ratio plausible.

The posted rate, realized rate and employee wage are different quantities. Separate an hour credit from a dollar discount so the same concession is not deducted twice. For payroll and technician review, use the wage and task time actually applicable to the work rather than today's rate setting.

Measure bay occupation with a state ledger

The example opens 3 bays for 40.0 hours each, providing 120.0 open bay-hours. Count the union of vehicle-occupation intervals in each bay, clipped to the same opening window. Time a car spends in the parking area is not lift occupation. Record closures or an unsafe/unusable lift separately; do not shrink the denominator silently to make utilization rise.

Occupation is 66.7%, while 32.0 bay-hours are waits for parts, approval or pickup. These are constructed state measurements, not a published supplier benchmark. The 45.0 active bay-hours need not equal technician-hours: people can assist together, work off the bay or leave a machine operating. High occupation may therefore describe congestion rather than high billed output.

Follow one vehicle through a full day

The repair-order record supports three totals for one vehicle. The waiting periods do not become technician work merely because the vehicle is still on the lift. Conversely, a technician's other jobs during those waits still belong in that person's paid-time ledger. Verify whether the vehicle can safely leave the bay before assuming a delayed part can release capacity; a dismantled vehicle may require planned off-bay space or a different job sequence.

Use observations to challenge the model's ceiling

The unchanged reference model has 346.7 paid technician-hours per average month and 520.0 open bay-hours. It applies an assumed 82.0% maximum billed share to the technician roster, or 65.6 billed hours per average week, and takes the smaller capacity branch. Its resulting 284.3 monthly billed-hour ceiling is tighter than its simplified bay branch.

That bay branch effectively treats billed hours as a one-for-one proxy for bay hours. The model has no repair-specific occupancy duration, parallel assistance or separate blocked-bay state. The diary above shows why a real schedule must test that simplification. It does not replace the original engine or turn a bay-hour into a person-hour. Existing case and its limitations

The mature 235.0 billed-hour demand equals 67.8% of the paid monthly roster. The ceiling is an assumption, not a measured target or a promise that those hours will sell. Do not feed invoiced carryover into a completion-capacity forecast, and do not add the owner adviser's time as mechanic capacity. The unit-economics guide connects the unchanged billed-hour basis to contribution.

Choose the next change from the constraint

Review the event logs with the technicians and service adviser, retain failed periods, and repeat the same definitions after the process change. A freed bay earns nothing without authorized demand, the right skills and the parts to finish it. Preserve road tests, inspections and quality checks rather than improving a ratio by deleting necessary work.

Use the profitability guide for the fixed roster and downside cash exposure, and the startup-cost guide for an actual equipment expansion. This article supplies a measurement method and a constructed diary; a real shop's time records, wage obligations and safe bay procedures still need local evidence.