A busy month that did not feel profitable
The workshop was flat out all month. Every technician was in every day, the yard was full, cars went out. Yet when the accounts came through, the labour figure did not match the effort. The owner asks the obvious question: where did the hours go? Nobody can answer with anything more than a guess.
Maybe it was the two heavy structural jobs that turned out worse than estimated. Maybe time was lost waiting for parts, or on rework after a colour mismatch, or on cars moved around the yard. Without time recorded against jobs, all of these are plausible and none can be shown.
Clocking is either missing or too fiddly to keep up
Some shops have never clocked jobs. Others bought a system with terminals on the wall that technicians were meant to use at every job change, and the habit faded within weeks because it meant walking across the workshop in gloves. Either way, the data that would explain the month is not there.
- Technicians move between jobs several times a day, especially while waiting for parts or paint.
- Non-productive time (cleaning, moving cars, waiting) is not separated from job time.
- Rework after quality checks is hidden inside the original job.
- Sold hours sit in the estimate, and nobody lines them up against actual time.
Why not knowing is expensive
Labour is what you sell. If certain types of job consistently take longer than the hours the work provider pays, you are doing them at a loss and cannot raise it with evidence. If time is being lost between jobs rather than on them, the answer is in workshop flow, not in effort, and you cannot see that either.
A worked example: a rear quarter repair is sold at a set number of panel hours. The technician starts it on Monday, stops for a supplementary, spends Tuesday on another car, comes back on Wednesday, finds a bracket missing, and finishes on Thursday. The time actually spent on the car might be close to what was sold, or well over it. Without a record, the only thing anyone knows is that it took four days.
How we build job clocking that technicians will use
- Each technician has a shared workshop tablet or their own phone with a very simple screen: scan or pick the job, pick the operation (strip, panel, prep, paint, fit, MET), start.
- Switching to another job is one tap, which stops the previous clock. Breaks and non-job tasks have their own buttons, such as waiting for parts or moving cars.
- Sold hours for each job and department are taken from the approved estimate and supplementaries.
- A job view shows sold against actual for each operation, and flags rework recorded after a failed quality check.
- Weekly reports group results by job type, work provider, department and technician, with non-job time shown separately.
- Nothing is used to manage individuals until you have decided how you want to use it, and staff know what is recorded and why.
| Report | What it shows |
|---|---|
| By job type | Which repairs regularly run over sold hours |
| By work provider | Whether one provider's labour times are consistently tight |
| Non-job time | Hours lost to waiting, moving cars and cleaning |
| Rework | Time spent redoing work after quality checks |
How you use time data with your staff, and what you tell them about it, is a decision for you and, where needed, your HR adviser. The build records time; it does not set policy.
What you know at the end of the month
The month's labour figure comes with an explanation: which jobs overran and by how much, where time was lost between jobs, and which work providers' hours are consistently tight. Some of the fixes are in the workshop, such as parts arriving complete before a job starts. Some are conversations with work providers, backed by your own data.
Technicians often like it more than expected, because it shows when they were held up by things outside their control.
Signs you need job clocking
- You know hours attended but not hours spent per job.
- A previous clocking system was abandoned.
- You suspect certain repair types lose money but cannot show it.
- Rework time is not recorded anywhere.
- Time lost waiting for parts is invisible in the figures.