COST PER TRUCK PER DAY.
A service business sells the output of its trucks. One truck with one technician in it is 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. That's the floor for every work order you price and the number you measure every hiring decision against.
You probably know your technician's hourly wage. The wage is usually well under half of what it costs to put that truck on the road. If you price against the wage, your number is low by a large multiple. Every work order looks profitable, the schedule stays full, and you still can't pay for a second truck out of your own cash.
WHAT IT MEANS.
Cost per truck per day is the fully burdened daily cost of one unit of service capacity. That's one technician, one vehicle, and that unit's share of overhead, 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 vary more between two metros than between two trades. A national average gross margin or net profit figure for service work is wrong for some market the day it's printed. We build your cost per truck per day from your own payroll, your own fleet cost, and your own office overhead.
This is also why the construction material on the rest of this site only half applies to you. A service business has no job with a contract value to be over or under billed against. So you have no schedule of values, pay application, retainage or WIP schedule. You have the unit economics of one truck for one day, and you need to know 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 costs of the same person, and none of them are in that answer. If you price on the bare wage, you price on a fraction of the cost. The error repeats on every work order the technician completes that year.
The truck bears 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 are in a general overhead account that no work order ever touches. If you never divide overhead across the trucks, no price ever recovers it. Revenue grows and the bank balance stays flat.
Busy is used as the utilization figure
Everybody is working, the phone is ringing, and the schedule is full. Capacity feels tight, so it feels like time to add a truck. But a technician can be on the clock ten hours and bill four of them. That feels like a very busy day, and the truck operated 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. Take a technician at $30 an hour on a 40 hour week. That's $1,200 of wage. Add 28 percent for payroll taxes, workers compensation, benefits, and paid time off. That's $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. That's $1,800 a month, or roughly $416 a week. Add $50 a week for tools and consumables. Then the office. Say dispatch, software, rent, and the phone total $12,000 a month across four trucks. This truck takes on $3,000 a month, or about $692 a week. The weekly total is $2,694. Over five working days that's $538.80 a day.
The billable hour ratio is billable hours divided by paid hours. It's the utilization figure for 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. Now say drive time, a warehouse stop, and one callback take another hour. 5 of 8 hours bill and the ratio falls to 62.5 percent. The truck still costs the same for the day, and the cost per billable hour is now $107.76. A lower billable ratio raises what you have to charge to cover the truck.
Keep the same truck at $538.80 a day and six billable hours in the day. A two hour work order uses two of those six hours, so it takes on two sixths of the day's cost. That's $179.60 before a dollar of material. Quote it at $150 of labor plus $40 of material at cost and the call loses money, even though the technician's two hours of wage were only $60 plus burden. That's how you fill your schedule with work orders that each feel profitable and finish the year with nothing in the account.
Adding a truck at the same costs 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 uses $8,352 of cash before the truck breaks even on its own daily cost. Make the hiring decision against that figure. It also 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. We split the office overhead across the trucks the office exists to keep busy. You get a single dollar figure per truck per day, plus a cost per billable hour at your current ratio. We don't use a trade association average, because your market sets your labor cost and your competitive pricing.
We report billable hours divided by paid hours every month, per technician and for the company, next to the cost per billable hour it produces. This number tells you whether you have a capacity problem or a dispatch problem. A ratio below your target usually comes from travel time, parts trips, and return trips. Each of those has a fix that costs less than a truck.
Once you know the cost per billable hour, every service gets a minimum price that covers the truck plus your target contribution. The flat rate book gets rebuilt against it. Diagnostic calls, trip charges, and after hours work each get their own floor, because each uses a different part of the day. If you price work below the floor, you do it on purpose.
Before you add capacity we model the ramp. The model has the weeks to full productivity, the billable ratio during the ramp, and the cash the truck uses before break even. It also has the billable ratio your existing trucks would need to cover the demand, and whether they can reach it. 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 changes with the season and the weather. A fleet has fixed weekly costs in every season. Your 13 week rolling forecast includes the burdened truck cost as a committed weekly outflow, so you see a slow stretch 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. We don't bill by the hour, and we don't do payroll. The one-time onboarding fee is in the table.
Built for subs doing $1M to $12M. Above $12.5M we quote.
| Last 12 months revenue | Core | Strategic | Platinum | One-time onboarding |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $1M | $1,900 | $3,100 | $3,300 | $2,500 |
| $1M to $3.5M | $2,600 | $4,100 | $5,300 | $4,500 |
| $3.5M to $6.5M | $3,800 | $5,900 | $8,300 | $6,000 |
| $6.5M to $9.5M | $5,100 | $7,600 | $11,800 | $7,500 |
| $9.5M to $12.5M | $6,100 | $8,900 | $14,900 | $9,000 |
| Above $12.5M | Quoted | Quoted | Quoted | Quoted |
The onboarding fee covers migrating your books back to the start of your last taxable year and getting you fully operational in 60 days. It's billed once, with your first invoice. It's the same for all three tiers, and it moves with your revenue band. Your first month is prorated, and your monthly engagement starts on the first of the first full month.
Just want the setup? Onboarding only is the same onboarding work with no monthly service after it, one time, at the onboarding fee plus $2,000. Start a monthly engagement later and $2,000 counts toward it. It starts at $4,500, and the price for every band is on the pricing page.
The three tier columns are the whole price. Which one fits depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No payroll. No hidden line items. The onboarding fee is right here in the table.
- Online software only: QuickBooks, Sage, Viewpoint and similar. No VPN or hosted desktop.
- Not in any tier: payroll, pay applications, collections on receivables.
- Pricing valid through 2027.
CFO work. Your own bookkeeper keeps doing the books.
We build your plan every month. Your team does the work.
You get the CFO work: job costing built to match the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, WIP every month, and a monthly meeting that ends with decisions.
Your bookkeeper still does the books.
Core, plus bookkeeping and bank reconciliations, plus job costing and WIP software set up and managed for you. Use your own online accounting software or we supply it, one price.
We build the plan, track it and adjust it every month.
We only work with trade subcontractors. We know what to look for, and we fix problems while they're still small. Everything in Core, plus the bookkeeping and bank reconciliations done for you, and the job costing and WIP software set up, loaded with your cost codes, and managed every month. Use your own online software, or move to ours and we pay for it.
Our team does the bookkeeping and the reconciliations. We don't do payroll.
Strategic, plus a controller who handles payables and receivables the way an in-house controller would. You approve every payment.
We manage the money side for you, every week.
Everything in Strategic, plus our team does the controller work. We handle your bills and receivables the way an in-house controller would: we call vendors, pay the bills and keep the accounting current. We plan the cash flow first, and you approve every payment because it is your money.
Our team does the payables and receivables. We don't do payroll, pay applications or collections.
FREQUENTLY ASKED.
