ROUTE DENSITY AND THE WINDSHIELD TAX.
Travel time is the biggest uncosted expense in most service businesses. A technician paid for eight hours who bills six has two hours of cost and no revenue against it. In most books those two hours are inside a labor total with nothing to attach them to. Route density decides how many of the paid eight turn into billable work. That puts it ahead of your rate card, and it changes your margin more than pricing does. Once travel time has its own cost code, whether to serve an outlying area is math anybody in the office can do.
We don't publish service business margin benchmarks, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. 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. An average built somewhere else was never true where you operate. Every figure in your route math comes out of your own book: your wage rates, your windshield hours, your stop times, your addresses. That's slower than a benchmark. It's also the only answer worth pricing against.
WHAT IT MEANS.
Route density is how many billable stops one technician or crew can complete in a day without leaving the service radius. Drive time is the paid, unbilled time between those stops, and in most service books it's the largest cost that never gets coded to anything.
A service business doesn't have a schedule of values, retainage, a pay application or a WIP schedule. That sounds like a good thing until you go looking for where a bad week went. There's also no job to code the wasted hour to. The work order closes at the price on the agreement. The technician gets paid for the full day. The difference goes into a labor total nobody reads by crew.
Service owners tell us the same thing. The schedule is full, the crews are busy and the invoices go out. The bank account still doesn't agree. The revenue is real and the hours are real. What's missing is a record of how much of the paid day went to work that earns revenue and how much went to getting there. Josh calls the difference the windshield tax. Most service businesses have never seen a number for it.
WHERE THE DAY GOES.
Drive time has no cost code, so it has no cost
Almost every service book codes labor to the work order and stops there. The paid day is eight hours. The work orders on it account for six. The other two have nothing to attach to. That cost is real and it's paid out. It just never appears anywhere a person would look for it. A cost with no code never makes it into your pricing.
Route density decides margin before pricing gets a say
Two technicians on the same wage, selling the same service at the same published price, can make completely different margins in the same week. The one on a tight route bills more of the paid day than the one crossing town between calls. Density sets how much of the day turns into revenue. That comes before the rate card. Raising your price on a loose route gets back part of the loss and leaves the cause in place.
The outlying customer gets priced like a local one
A customer forty minutes past the last stop on the route pays the same published rate as one four minutes away. Your price list has no line for distance. That one account can use most of a technician's morning for a short service call. It can lose money at any price you could fairly charge for the work itself. Sales says yes because revenue is revenue. Nobody checked the round trip against the day it falls on.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN DOLLARS.
A technician paid for eight hours who bills six is at 75 percent utilization. The two unbilled hours are cost with nothing earned against them. Say fully burdened labor costs $45 an hour. We picked that figure only to show the math. Those two hours are $90 a day, or about $22,500 across a 250 day work year for one technician. Five technicians on the same example is roughly $112,500 a year that never had a cost code.
Take one crew, six stops and a 45 minute service at each. That's 4.5 billable hours however the route goes. On a tight route with 15 minutes between stops, the five trips between them add 1.25 hours and the day finishes inside 6 hours. Spread the same six stops out so each trip is 35 minutes. Travel becomes nearly 3 hours, and the day goes past 7.4 hours for the same six invoices. Same revenue, same wage, and the second day costs close to 30 percent more. This is a made-up example, built to show the math.
One account is 40 minutes past the last stop on the route. Serving it is 80 minutes of paid travel for a 45 minute call. So 2 hours and 5 minutes of the paid day produces 45 minutes of billable work. To earn the same hourly rate as those 45 minutes, the visit would have to be priced at nearly three times a standard call. Again, this is an example. Do this math before the account gets added.
HOW THE ROUTE GETS PRICED.
The first change is a cost code for windshield time next to the service codes. The hours between stops get coded to it. Once it exists, every technician week reports two totals: hours sold and hours on the road. The road number is almost always bigger than the owner guessed. It's the first time you can see the windshield tax well enough to argue about it.
A work order priced at the counter looks profitable by itself, because it only counts the minutes on site. Costing the whole crew day tells you what the day produced against what it cost, travel included. A service business earns by the crew day. That number shows which routes pay for the business and which ones get subsidized.
The radius gets drawn from your own drive data. Outside it is a set zone, and work there comes with a trip charge, a minimum visit size, a single scheduled day of the week, or a polite decline. All four are fair answers, and we have set up all four. The wrong answer is having no answer, so the dispatch board decides it one call at a time.
When a request comes in from outside the radius, check what the round trip does to the day it falls on. Check whether the nearby stops can absorb it. Then check whether enough demand exists out there to build a second density cluster. One customer past the line is a cost. Twelve customers past the line, scheduled together, is a route. The math tells you which one you have, and we work it out with you before the quote goes out.
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.
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