COST PER TRUCK PER DAY.
A service business doesn't sell jobs, it sells the output of trucks. One truck with one technician in it's one unit of capacity, and that unit costs money every day whether it bills or not. The fully burdened daily cost includes wage plus payroll burden, the vehicle payment, fuel, maintenance, insurance, tools and consumables, and the truck's share of dispatch and office cost. Divide that total by working days and you have the floor under every work order you price and the number every hiring decision gets measured against.
Most owners can quote the technician's hourly wage and stop there. The wage is usually well under half of what it costs to put that truck on the road, so the figure they price against is low by a large multiple. Every work order looks profitable, the schedule stays full, and the company still can't fund a second truck out of its own cash.
WHAT IT MEANS.
Cost per truck per day is the fully burdened daily cost of one unit of service capacity: one technician, one vehicle, and the share of overhead that unit carries, divided by the days it's available to work.
We don't publish a service business margin benchmark, and we wouldn't price against one if we had it. Labor rates, drive time, competitive density, and what a market will pay for a recurring agreement move further between two metros than they do between two trades. A national average gross margin or net profit figure for service work is wrong somewhere before it's even printed. Your cost per truck per day gets built from your own payroll, your own fleet cost, and your own office overhead, which is the only place it has ever been true.
This is also why the construction spine on the rest of this site only half applies to you. There's no schedule of values, no pay application, no retainage held, and no WIP schedule to run, because there's no job with a contract value to be over or under billed against. What replaces all of it's the unit economics of one truck for one day, and the discipline of knowing that figure before you quote.
WHY THE NUMBER COMES OUT LOW.
The wage is treated as the cost
Ask an owner what a technician costs and the answer is the hourly wage. Payroll taxes, workers compensation, benefits, and paid time off are all real costs of the same person, and none of them are in that answer. Pricing built on a bare wage is pricing built on a fraction of the truth, and the error compounds across every work order the technician runs that year.
The truck carries overhead nobody assigns to it
Dispatch, scheduling, phones, software, the office lease, and the person answering the phone all exist to keep trucks productive. In most books those costs sit in a general overhead bucket that no work order ever touches. If overhead is never divided across the trucks, then no price ever recovers it, and the company grows revenue while the bank balance stays flat.
Busy is used as the utilization figure
Everybody is working, the phone is ringing, and the schedule is full, so capacity feels tight and it's time to add a truck. Feeling busy isn't a measurement. A technician can be on the clock ten hours and bill four of them, and the company will experience that as a very busy day while the truck ran at less than half its capacity. Adding a second truck to a business with a low billable ratio doubles the daily cost and buys very little revenue.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN DOLLARS.
These figures are made up for the demonstration, not drawn from any dataset. Take a technician at $30 an hour on a 40 hour week, so $1,200 of wage. Add 28 percent for payroll taxes, workers compensation, benefits, and paid time off, which is $336, for $1,536 a week of burdened labor. The vehicle costs a $700 monthly payment, $300 of insurance, $600 of fuel, and a $200 maintenance reserve, which is $1,800 a month, or roughly $416 a week. Put $50 a week against tools and consumables. Then take the office: if dispatch, software, rent, and the phone total $12,000 a month across four trucks, this truck carries $3,000 a month, or about $692 a week. The weekly total is $2,694, and over five working days that's $538.80 a day.
The billable hour ratio is billable hours divided by paid hours, and it's the real utilization figure in a service business. A technician paid for 8 hours who bills 6 of them is at 75 percent. With the $538.80 daily cost above, six billable hours puts the cost per billable hour at $89.80. Let drive time, a warehouse stop, and one callback take another hour, so 5 of 8 hours bill and the ratio falls to 62.5 percent. The daily cost hasn't moved, but the cost per billable hour is now $107.76. The billable ratio doesn't change what the truck costs, it changes what you have to charge to cover it.
Keep the same truck at $538.80 a day and six billable hours in the day. A two hour work order consumes two of those six hours, so it carries two sixths of the day's cost, which is $179.60, before a dollar of material. Quote it at $150 of labor plus $40 of material at cost and the call has lost money, even though the technician's two hours of wage were only $60 plus burden. That's how a business fills its schedule with work orders that each feel profitable and finishes the year with nothing in the account.
Adding a truck on the same cost structure adds $2,694 a week and $538.80 a day from the first Monday, whether the truck bills or not. Say the new technician ramps over eight weeks and averages three billable hours a day while learning the routes. Eight weeks of cost is $21,552. Eight weeks of revenue at three billable hours a day, five days a week, and $110 an hour is 120 hours for $13,200. The ramp consumes $8,352 of cash before the truck breaks even on its own daily cost. That figure, not the feeling that everyone is busy, is what the hiring decision should be made against, and it's also the figure that tells you how much cash to have available before you make the hire.
THE UNIT COST, BUILT AND ENFORCED.
We build the figure from your payroll register, your fleet costs, and your operating expenses, one line at a time, and we split the office overhead across the trucks that the office exists to keep busy. The output is a single dollar figure per truck per day, plus a cost per billable hour at your current ratio. No average from a trade association enters the calculation, because your market sets your labor cost and your competitive pricing, and no published figure knows either one.
Billable hours divided by paid hours, per technician and for the company, reported monthly next to the cost per billable hour it produces. This is the number that tells you whether you have a capacity problem or a dispatch problem. Ratios below your target usually point at drive time, parts runs, and return trips rather than at technicians working slowly, and each of those has a fix that costs less than a truck.
Once the cost per billable hour is known, every service gets a minimum price that covers the truck plus your target contribution, and the flat rate book gets rebuilt against it. Diagnostic calls, trip charges, and after hours work each get their own floor, because each consumes a different slice of the day. Work below the floor becomes a deliberate decision rather than an accident of an old price list.
Before you add capacity we model the ramp: the weeks to full productivity, the billable ratio during the ramp, the cash the truck consumes before break even, and the point at which the existing trucks would have to hit an unreachable ratio to cover the demand instead. Sometimes the answer is a truck. Often the answer is raising the billable ratio on the trucks you already own, which costs nothing and is available immediately.
Service revenue comes in faster than construction revenue, but it's lumpy by season and by weather, and a fleet has fixed weekly costs that don't care about either. Your 13 week rolling forecast carries the burdened truck cost as a committed weekly outflow, so a slow stretch is visible weeks before it reaches the account. Working capital gets held against the same figure, in the range of 10 to 15 percent of revenue.
THE OUTPUTS, NAMED.
FLAT MONTHLY FEE. NO SURPRISES.
Three tiers, priced by your trailing twelve month revenue. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No hourly billing, no payroll, and no add-ons.
Pricing
| Last 12 months revenue | Monthly fee |
|---|---|
| Up to $1M | $1,900 to $2,900 |
| $1M to $3.5M | $2,600 to $3,900 |
| $3.5M to $6.5M | $3,800 to $5,700 |
| $6.5M to $9.5M | $5,100 to $7,100 |
| $9.5M to $12.5M | $6,100 to $8,500 |
| $12.5M to $15.5M | $7,400 to $11,000 |
| $15.5M to $18.5M | $9,400 to $13,500 |
| $18.5M+ | Quoted individually |
Range reflects the three tiers below. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No payroll. No hidden line items.
You stop guessing.
You get the CFO work. Job costing built against the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, monthly WIP, and a meeting every month that ends in decisions rather than a report.
Your bookkeeper keeps doing the books.
You stop touching the books.
Everything in Core, and we run the bookkeeping and the controllership as well. Nobody in your office is answering coding questions or chasing a reconciliation at month end.
We do the books. No payroll.
Every job shows its margin while it's still running.
Everything in Executive, plus the job costing and WIP platform set up, loaded with your cost codes, and managed for you every month. You never have to learn it.
We do the job costing.
FREQUENTLY ASKED.
