Revenue is always an easy KPI to understand, but in our increasingly impatient and demanding world, time is money.
When was the last time you looked at the time stats in your business?
Could you tell me how long on average it takes to get a job through from creation to completion?
Is this a number that would be useful to keep an eye on?
For example, there’ll be a sweet spot for the time it takes to get work done – you might find that if you turn jobs around too fast, there are problems… but on the other hand there will be lots of ways that success of a job would be improved if the time taken was reduced.
Once you’ve taken a look at overall time from job creation to completion, you could then start to look at time taken to reply to the customer initially, time taken to get the job from quote to work order, time taken to order parts, receive parts, book subcontractors etc.
Work out where the delays are and then pick them off one by one.
A simple place to start with looking at this this would be your job report – you can download this into excel with the use of the Advanced Reporting Pack add-on.
For those of you who are more confident with Excel:
Download your job report – the job date is the date the job was created and then all jobs with completed status will also have a date.
Filter by job status = completed and then copy and paste all of these into another sheet.
Use the formula =DAYS(completion date,date) –
This will count the days between the completion date and the job creation date.
Highlight the column to find an average.
You can also use a pivot table to look at month by month.
These are the numbers from my account.
I was pretty shocked when I realised the average number of days for me to turn a job from creation to completion in 2023 was 33 days!
These figures will be pushed up by implementations I offer.. which can sometimes span 6 – 8 weeks, but it’s shocked me into really focusing on a faster overall turnaround and given me a new energy for getting my work done and back as fast as I can.
I could start to break these numbers down by looking at different job categories and then start to hone in on different types of work..
Hopefully this has given you some ideas and a plan to find a benchmark that you can work to understand and improve on.
Do you do this in your business already?
Want more time tracking reporting options? Try winkreports.com
