Service scheduling program

A service scheduling programme is the part of a field service business that is supposed to be predictable: customers on an agreement, planned visits, known hours. It is also the part most often sold on instinct, at a price per visit nobody has checked against the technician time it consumes. This worksheet does that check, and it is the one that most often produces an uncomfortable answer.

Count the agreements, then count the visits they promise

240 customers at 2 visits a year is 480 visits, and 480 visits at 1.3 hours is 624 technician hours that have to come out of the same capacity as your reactive work. That is the collision this worksheet is really about: the programme is not free capacity, it is booked capacity with the price already agreed.

Load the technician rate properly

$58 an hour is meant to be what an hour of technician costs the business, which is the wage plus employment costs plus the van. Where certification is a legal condition of the work, such as the Environmental Protection Agency requirement for handling refrigerant, the cost of keeping people certified belongs in that number too.

Read the margin, then decide what it is buying

$33,408 on this example, before any repair work the visits uncover. If that number is thin, the options are a higher price per visit, fewer visits a year, or shorter visits, and the worksheet lets you try all three in about a minute. Discovering it is negative is unpleasant and is still the cheapest way to find out.