Mobile repair: a technician drives 37.5% of the shift

“Five technicians, five call-outs each a day, 550 call-outs a month and 649 000 ₴ of revenue. And what I take home — 39 500 ₴. For two years I was certain that in-home appliance repair is simply that kind of business: work up to your neck, pennies of money” — that is how Ruslan Pylypchuk, owner of a domestic appliance repair service in Rivne, opened the conversation.

If you run a mobile repair service, you know this arithmetic by heart. The technicians are booked a week ahead, the dispatcher turns people away because there are no free slots. And the bottom line shows a sum that would not even replace one van.

The calculation breaks in one place. Ruslan measured the workload in call-outs: five people, five jobs each — everyone busy. But a technician does not sell the customer a call-out, he sells his hour. And out of 880 paid hours a month he stands next to an appliance for only 495.

Below we break a mobile repair service down into two units — the call-out and the technician's hour — and we get to why the driving costs 99 000 ₴ a month, 2.51 times more than the entire profit.

Ruslan's road: from one tool case to five vans

Ruslan started on his own: a case of tools, an old hatchback, ads in the local groups. He took the calls himself, drove out himself, wrote out the bill himself. He kept the maths in a notebook: what he took from people, what he paid for parts, what he put in the tank.

In six years there were five technicians, each with his own van. A dispatcher on the phone appeared, a small stock of the fastest-moving parts, a budget for advertising. That is when the feel for the numbers went: revenue came along behind the people, and the profit stayed where it had been in the third year.

“When I drove out myself, I knew everything about my day: where I went, how long I spent there, how long it took me to reach the next address. Now I have five vans — and ask me how long my technician spent behind the wheel today. I will not answer. All I see is closed jobs.”

Why “five technicians, five call-outs each” tells you nothing about money

There are two different fives here at once, and they are worth separating. Five is the technicians on the payroll. And five is the call-outs each of them closes in a day. Multiply by 22 working days and you get 550 call-outs a month.

The call-out is what you get paid for. But a technician does not carry a call-out to the address, he carries himself: he is on a salary with a piece-rate part, the van is on a lease, the fuel burns whether the next address is two blocks away or right across town.

As long as the books hold the line “550 call-outs closed”, the simplest question stays unanswered: how many minutes the service drove under each one of them.

Life before the technician's hour became a line

The bookkeeping Ruslan lived with through those years is recognisable to any mobile service that grew out of a single tool case.

• The workload was measured in call-outs. Five jobs per technician meant the day was full, and nobody ever checked that number against hours.
• The driving was neither work nor a cost. It simply was — like the weather between two addresses.
• Fuel was seen as one line for the fleet. With no breakdown by van and no link to how many jobs that mileage served.
• Jobs went into the schedule in the order they came in. Whoever called earlier stands earlier, whatever the address.
• The unit cost of a call-out was counted as parts. The rest was written off to “general costs”, and that money never reached a specific job.
• Cheap repairs were taken “so the technician is not idle”. Nobody ever totalled up what that came to over a month.

Not one of these six points is about repair. The technicians were working properly, there were almost no complaints. All six times it was the numbers — and out on the road nobody keeps numbers at all.

The unit that matters: not the call-out, the technician's hour

The call-out is the unit you take money from the customer in. The technician's hour is the unit you spend it in. While the two live in different notebooks, the unit cost of a job stays a fiction.

The pool is simple to count. Five technicians, 22 working days, a shift of 8 hours — 880 hours a month together. Those are what the service pays for every month, and those are what get shared between three different things.

Where the shift goes: 96 minutes per call-out

For two weeks Ruslan asked the technicians to put three marks on the job ticket: arrived, finished, left. The table came out of those.

What exactly	Minutes per call-out	Hours a month	Share of the pool
Work on site	54	495	56.3%
Driving between call-outs	36	330	37.5%
Paperwork, parts, phone calls	6	55	6.3%
Total	96	880	100%

One call-out takes 96 minutes of a technician's time, and 54 of them are spent next to the appliance. The rest of the time he is either behind the wheel, or filling in the worksheet, or phoning the next customer.

54 minutes and 55 hours are not the same number

These two figures look alike and are easy to merge into one. Let us separate them: 54 minutes is the work next to the appliance on one call-out. 55 hours is the monthly pool for paperwork, parts and calls across the whole company. Different units, different scale.

What an hour of a technician costs: 300 ₴

Technicians and vans cost the service 264 000 ₴ a month. That sum does not depend on what the technician is doing in any given minute: the salary accrues, the lease is debited, the insurance is already paid.

• Technicians — 173 500 ₴. The salaries of the five plus the piece-rate part for closed jobs.
• Vans — 90 500 ₴. Lease, insurance, fuel and servicing for five vehicles.
• Inside the vans: fuel and servicing — 24 090 ₴. That is the cost of 8 030 km of mileage a month, the only part that really changes with the length of the route.

Divide 264 000 ₴ by the 880 hours of the pool and you get exactly 300 ₴ an hour. That is the price of an hour of a technician with a van, the same for any minute of the shift.

Now lay the pool out at that price. Work on site: 495 hours — 148 500 ₴. Driving: 330 hours — 99 000 ₴. Two similar figures in one sentence: 330 is the hours of driving a month, 300 ₴ is the price of one hour.

The driving in money: 99 000 ₴ against 39 500 ₴ of profit

This is where the mechanism clicks. The driving takes 330 hours out of 880, that is 37.5% of the whole paid pool. At a price of 300 ₴ an hour that is 99 000 ₴ a month.

And the profit of the service for that same month is 39 500 ₴. The driving costs 2.51 times more than everything Ruslan takes home — and nowhere is it visible, because the books hold no such line.

There is not a single paid repair on that road. The customer pays for the technician standing next to his washing machine — nobody pays for the steering wheel.

“They showed me the line: driving — 99 000 ₴ a month. I asked again whether that was for the year. It turned out to be for the month — and that is two and a half times more than my profit. I counted parts to the hryvnia, and the biggest cost of all I did not even write into the report: it never gets billed to anyone.”

The report where everything reconciles

Here is the month Ruslan based every decision on. The revenue is simple: 550 call-outs at an average ticket of 1 180 ₴ makes 649 000 ₴.

Cost line	₴/month
Parts (550 × 290 ₴)	159 500
Technicians and vans	264 000
Dispatcher and office	74 000
Advertising and leads	88 000
Other	24 000
Total	609 500

Profit: 649 000 − 609 500 = 39 500 ₴ a month, a net margin of 6.09%. Six per cent and change — the figure Ruslan quoted whenever people asked how business was.

There is not a single error in these figures

The delivery notes, the worksheets, the payroll sheet, the bank statement — it all reconciles to the hryvnia, there is nothing to look for. The parts in the average ticket stand at a cost of 290 ₴, and 550 call-outs give exactly 159 500 ₴.

The problem is not that a cost was forgotten. The problem is that 264 000 ₴ stands as a single line, “technicians and vans” — and from that line there is no way to learn that 99 000 ₴ inside it falls on the driving.

Why the 99 000 ₴ cannot be subtracted from the profit

The commonest reaction to a figure like that is to add the 99 000 ₴ to the costs or subtract it from the profit. That must not be done: on paper the service would instantly turn deeply loss-making, which it is not.

No new cost has appeared here. That money already lies inside the 264 000 ₴, and those lie inside the 609 500 ₴ of all costs. The driving is not a separate cost line but 37.5% of the existing pool of hours, recalculated at that same price of 300 ₴ an hour.

The costs of the service were and remain 609 500 ₴, the profit 39 500 ₴. No breakdown adds money and none takes it away.

What the figure is for, then

So that the driving has a sum. While it is background, it cannot be compared, or planned, or put in the queue of decisions. When it is 99 000 ₴ a month, it is immediately clear why it deserves a conversation of its own at the weekly meeting.

It is also the limit of the bargain. Measure everything that shortens the driving against those 99 000 ₴: from the dispatcher's schedule to where the parts store sits.

The driving costs the same whatever the ticket: 180 ₴ a call-out

The second turn matters more than the first. Divide 264 000 ₴ by 550 call-outs and you get 480 ₴. That is what the time of a technician and a van costs per job, and that sum is the same for every call-out.

Inside those 480 ₴ the driving takes 180 ₴: 36 minutes at a price of 300 ₴ an hour. It is the same 37.5%, only now not of the pool but of the cost of time on one call-out.

The main thing about that figure is that it does not know what is written on the worksheet. The technician spends the same 36 minutes of driving whether he is going to a difficult unit replacement or to clean a filter. The driving does not grow along with the ticket.

180 ₴ and 1 180 ₴ — label them both

These two figures are so alike that they get mixed up even on paper. Let us label them: 180 ₴ is the cost of driving on one call-out, a part of the unit cost. 1 180 ₴ is the average ticket, what the customer pays.

The first sits in the costs, the second in the revenue. Swap them round and the whole arithmetic falls apart, and with it any idea of which call-out is worth taking.

The contribution of a call-out: 410 ₴ — and when it goes negative

Now let us assemble a call-out in full. The customer pays 1 180 ₴. The parts in the ticket are 290 ₴ at cost. The time of the technician and the van is 480 ₴. That leaves 410 ₴ of contribution, and it is out of those that the service covers everything else.

Let us check it from the other side. 550 call-outs at 410 ₴ makes 225 500 ₴. Subtract the fixed 186 000 ₴: dispatcher and office, advertising, other. You get 39 500 ₴, the same profit as in the report.

And now put a cheap repair into the same formula. The customer agreed to 600 ₴ to clean a filter. Out of those 600 ₴ you have to cover 290 ₴ of parts and 480 ₴ of the technician's time with the van — the ticket does not even cover those two together. The call-out goes into the minus before the technician has opened his tool case, and the reason is not in the technician's hands but in the 180 ₴ of driving, the same here as anywhere.

“I always told the dispatcher: take everything, just don't let the technician stand idle. I thought a cheap call-out meant a small earning, but an earning all the same. It turned out to be a minus, and I had been ordering it myself for years. What annoys me most is that we even put those jobs first — they are quick, after all.”

The driving cannot be removed — it can be made a line

It is worth saying this plainly, because after calculations like these owners sometimes do strange things. Driving cannot be deleted from a mobile service: the appliance stands in the customer's kitchen, and bringing it to the workshop is impossible. A service without the driving does not exist.

So this is not about removing the driving but about it ceasing to be background and becoming a line in the unit cost — exactly like parts. With a price of its own and a planned value.

Nobody orders parts at random: there is a store, there are fast-moving items and there is a person who looks at the stock. But the driving is created afresh every day by the dispatcher, when she puts the jobs into the schedule — and until then nobody treated that minute as a decision about money.

“At first I heard it as: drive less. But how can we drive less when the appliances are in people's homes? And then it clicked: drive just as much, only not chaotically. The driving was the only cost nobody planned — the dispatcher simply piled it up every morning, not knowing that it costs anything.”

Same-district call-outs on one day: 36 minutes become 24

Ruslan's first decision cost nothing. The dispatcher stopped putting jobs into the schedule in the order they came in and started gathering them into district batches: the call-outs of one district go on one day to one technician. The customer is not told “we will come as soon as we can”, she is given a specific day — and almost everyone agrees.

The volume of work next to the appliance did not change — the same 54 minutes. What changed was the length of the drive between addresses: 24 minutes instead of 36.

Metric	Now	After clustering
Driving per call-out, min	36	24
Call-out in total, min	96	84
Call-outs a month	550	628
Increase in call-outs	—	78

The pool is the same: 880 hours, that is 52 800 minutes. Divide them by 84 minutes instead of 96 — and the same team closes 628 call-outs instead of 550. The increase is 78 call-outs a month without a single new technician and without one new van.

And let us separate two similar figures straight away. The 24 in this table is the minutes of driving on one call-out. The 24 000 ₴ in the cost table is the line “Other”. All they have in common is the digits.

Why 628 and not 628.57

If you divide 52 800 by 84 literally, you get 628.57. Rounding up is not allowed: the last incomplete hour does not produce a call-out. Either the technician manages to close the job within the shift, or it moves to the next day.

So the table shows 628 — rounded down. All the money that follows is counted from that figure, and so is the increase: 628 against 550 is 78 call-outs.

The increase in money: 61 386 ₴ a month

Now let us count what those 78 call-outs bring to the till. Care is needed here, otherwise it is easy to draw more than there is.

When you add a call-out to the team you already have, the salaries and the lease do not grow: the technician is on shift anyway, the van is paid for anyway. The only things that rise are those that depend on the job itself: parts 290 ₴, the technician's piece-rate part 70 ₴ and fuel 33 ₴ — 393 ₴ together.

So the contribution of an extra call-out is 1 180 − 393 = 787 ₴. Multiply by 78 and that is 61 386 ₴ a month, 1.55 times more than the current profit. From one change in the dispatcher's schedule.

Why it is 787 ₴ here and not 410 ₴

There are two contributions in this article, and they have to be kept in different pockets. 410 ₴ is the contribution of an ordinary call-out, where the time of the technician and the van is counted in full, at 480 ₴. That is the one you use to decide whether to take such a type of repair at all.

787 ₴ is the contribution of a call-out that squeezed into a shift already paid for: here the 480 ₴ is not added, because you have already bought those hours. With the first figure you go to the price list, with the second you go to the dispatcher.

“For a year and a half I was looking for a new technician and a new van, because it seemed that more money only ever comes from more people. And the extra 78 call-outs were lying in my own schedule — just scattered between districts.”

What changed when the driving became a line

Three things changed in the paperwork. Every job ticket got a field for the driving time — not to police the technician but to see the volume. The schedule started being built by districts rather than by the order of the calls. And every type of repair goes through a check against the 480 ₴ of time before it reaches the price list.

• The driving got a sum. 330 hours and 99 000 ₴ — 37.5% of the pool, and now it is visible that it is 2.51 times dearer than the profit, rather than “just being there”.
• District batches replaced the order of arrival. 24 minutes of driving instead of 36, 628 call-outs with the same team, 61 386 ₴ of increase a month.
• Cheap repairs stopped being “so he is not idle”. Some were bundled into packages with other work, some were moved to paid diagnostics. The contribution of 410 ₴ answers for a new type of job in two minutes.

Neither a new technician, nor a new van, nor a price rise was needed. What was needed was to see the technician's hour as a line with a price of its own.

The takeaway for entrepreneurs. If your people drive out to the customer, then the measure you take money in and the measure you spend it in are different ones. You count call-outs but you buy hours — and part of those hours goes every day on a drive that costs the same whatever the ticket. Count the price of your own hour, put the minutes of the drive next to it and look at what share of the pool goes on them. From there there are two decisions: do not take work whose ticket does not cover the time, and build the schedule so that the drive is shorter. Installation, equipment servicing and delivery-with-fitting work the same way.

A few last pieces of advice

• Count the price of an hour of your technician with his van. 264 000 ₴ over 880 hours is 300 ₴, and that figure is the same for any minute of the shift.
• Put the minutes of driving on the job ticket. While the drive has no number, it has no price either: 36 minutes give 330 hours and 99 000 ₴ a month.
• Count the workload in hours, not in call-outs. Five jobs look like a full day, although only 495 hours out of 880 are spent next to appliances.
• Work out the cost of time on one call-out. 480 ₴, of which 180 ₴ is the drive — with a figure like that a new type of repair is assessed before it reaches the price list.
• Do not take a call-out whose ticket does not cover the parts plus the time. A repair for 600 ₴ goes into the minus against 290 ₴ of parts and 480 ₴ of time, however quick it may look.
• Gather the jobs into district batches before you go looking for people. The drive coming down from 36 minutes to 24 gave 78 call-outs a month with the same team.
• Count the gain from a shorter drive at marginal cost. 393 ₴ per extra call-out, not 480 ₴ of time: salaries and the lease do not grow from a denser schedule, which is why the contribution here is 787 ₴.

The money does not vanish — you simply do not see it

People think a mobile service rests on two things: the technician's hands and the flow of jobs. Without them you really cannot start. But the earnings are decided by a third — what share of the paid hours reaches the appliance, and what share stays on a road that costs the same whatever the ticket.

A hole like that does not close over on its own and it will not show up in the bottom line: the line totals the month, while the drive lies there in 36-minute pieces between two doorways. Yet the moment the technician's hour gets a price, the main thing becomes visible: the 6.09% net margin belongs neither to the work next to the appliance nor to the drive. It is the proportion in which 495 hours you are paid for and 330 hours nobody pays for got mixed together.

How to see this in your own service

Everything described above rests on one table: each call-out is a row where the time on site, the time on the road and the ticket stand side by side. While the workload is measured in call-outs, you see neither that the drive eats more than a third of the pool, nor that it costs the same whatever the ticket. When the same data is collected automatically, you see which call-out pays for the drive — which is exactly why small and medium business owners use Finmap: to see the financial picture instead of totting it up after the fact.

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Topic foundation: Management Accounting Explained: What It Is and Why Owners Need It