Time on Site
Definition
Time on site is the total minutes a technician spends at a customer's location from arrival to departure on a single job.
What Time on Site Means for Your Business
What it means
Time on site is one of the most important field metrics. It tells you how long real work takes, how accurate your estimates are, and how productive each tech actually is.
Why it matters
Track it and you can build better estimates, flag techs who are dragging, and spot jobs that need a second person. Ignore it and your whole pricing model drifts out of sync with reality.
How contractors use it
Good software logs arrival and departure automatically via GPS geofencing. Managers compare actual time on site to the flat rate book and adjust pricing quarterly.
Real-World Example
An HVAC service company found that 2-ton furnace installs averaged 5.8 hours on site, not the 4 hours in their price book. They raised the flat rate by $180 and recovered $54,000 over 300 annual installs.
Related Terms
Dispatch
Dispatch is the process of assigning field technicians to service calls and routing them to customer locations in the most efficient order.
Technician Utilization Rate
Technician utilization rate is the percentage of a tech's paid hours that are actually billed to customers as productive work.
Flat Rate Pricing
Flat rate pricing charges a fixed amount for a specific task, regardless of how long the technician actually takes to complete it.
Job Costing
Job costing is the practice of tracking every labor, material, and overhead cost tied to a specific job so you can measure its true profitability.
Price Book
A price book is a standardized catalog of labor and material tasks with pre-set flat rate prices that technicians use in the field.
Put This Into Practice with Free Software
Kaldr Tech handles time on site and everything else you need to run your shop. $0/month, 3.5% + 30¢ per transaction.