How to Track Technician Utilization

Why This Matters

Technician utilization is the hidden lever behind every other financial metric. A tech who is 60 percent utilized at $91 per billable hour produces 4.8 billable hours per 8 hour shift, which at the industry average ticket of $687 amortizes to roughly $412 of daily productive time. The same tech at 78 percent utilization produces 6.2 billable hours and roughly $535 of daily productive time, a $123 daily lift or $29,520 per tech per year at 240 working days. On a 5 tech shop, that is $147,600 in annual gross profit recovered from the same payroll and truck cost. Nothing else in the business comes close to that leverage. The reason most shops ignore utilization is they confuse it with how busy the tech feels. A tech running 8 calls a day can still be 55 percent utilized if each call has 30 minutes of non productive windshield time, prep time, or admin time baked into it. The metric exposes waste the eye cannot see.

The Steps

1. 1

   Step 1: Define billable time clearly

   Billable time is any minute a tech is physically working on a customer job that will appear on an invoice. It includes diagnosis, repair, testing, and invoice presentation. It does not include driving between jobs, waiting at the supply house, restocking the truck, attending the morning huddle, lunch breaks, or callback work (which is technically warranty time, not new revenue). This strict definition matters because fuzzy definitions let operators inflate utilization numbers that mean nothing. Write the definition down and share it with the team so everyone understands what counts.

   Pro tip: Exclude callbacks from billable time. Callbacks are rework, not revenue generation.

2. 2

   Step 2: Set up automatic time tracking in Kaldr Tech

   Open Kaldr Tech, go to Settings, Time Tracking, and enable automatic job timers. When a tech opens a job in the mobile app, the timer starts. When the invoice is marked complete, the timer stops. GPS cross checks the tech's location against the customer address to prevent forgotten stops. The system logs time in 3 categories: on job, driving, and other. Driving is calculated by GPS between stops. Other is anything that does not fit, which should be less than 10 percent of a healthy day. With this setup, utilization calculates automatically without tech data entry.

   Pro tip: Never ask techs to manually log hours. Manual tracking is always inflated and always resented.

3. 3

   Step 3: Calculate utilization and benchmark it

   Utilization equals billable hours divided by total paid hours. If a tech is paid for 8 hours and logs 5.1 billable hours, utilization is 63.75 percent. The industry benchmark for residential service is 70 percent. Elite shops hit 78 to 82 percent. Anything below 60 percent indicates a process problem, not a tech problem. Run the report for your shop's last 30 days and see where each tech lands. Write the numbers on the whiteboard. The first time you see the data, you will probably be surprised how much time is being lost to non billable activities nobody tracked before.

   Pro tip: Benchmark against your own historical data, not a generic industry number, for more useful comparisons.

4. 4

   Step 4: Identify the top 3 sources of lost time

   Review the time data and identify where the non billable hours are going. The top 3 causes of low utilization are (1) excess drive time from poor route sequencing, (2) supply house runs during peak hours, and (3) long administrative gaps between jobs while the tech waits for dispatch to push the next one. Quantify each bucket. If driving is 2.5 hours per tech per day, route optimization is the first fix. If supply house runs are 45 minutes per day, truck par sheet discipline is the fix. If gap time is 30 minutes per day, dispatch timing is the fix. Each bucket has a specific countermeasure.

   Pro tip: Track each bucket weekly so you can measure the effect of each fix separately.

5. 5

   Step 5: Apply the fix for the biggest bucket first

   Start with whichever bucket is largest. For most shops, that is drive time. Implement the route optimization framework (see how-to-optimize-a-technician-route) and measure utilization again after 2 weeks. For shops with excessive supply house runs, build a truck par sheet that stocks the top 50 parts with minimum quantities, restock every Monday morning before dispatch begins, and forbid supply house runs during 9 AM to 5 PM except in true emergency. These single fixes typically lift utilization by 4 to 8 percentage points in 30 days, which is enormous over a year.

   Pro tip: Never attack all three buckets at once. Fix one, measure, then move to the next.

6. 6

   Step 6: Post the utilization scoreboard publicly

   Write each tech's weekly utilization percentage on the shop whiteboard where everyone can see it. Do not rank them harshly or humiliate anyone, just post the numbers next to the 4 week average. Techs who see their own number versus their peers self correct faster than any coaching conversation can achieve. Within 4 weeks of posting numbers, the lowest performing tech typically moves 5 to 10 points up on his own, just from visibility. The scoreboard is the cheapest and most effective productivity tool in the trade.

   Pro tip: Celebrate improvement, not absolute numbers. A tech who moved from 58 to 68 deserves more praise than one holding at 74.

7. 7

   Step 7: Review weekly and protect the wins

   Every Friday, pull the utilization report and review it with your senior team. Look at trends. Are the fixes holding? Is any tech drifting down? Is there a new source of lost time that showed up this week? A single weekly 15 minute review keeps utilization high because small issues get caught before they compound. Shops that review utilization weekly sustain 75+ percent utilization for years. Shops that track it once and forget typically drift back to 60 percent within 6 months.

   Pro tip: Utilization is a discipline, not a project. Protect the cadence forever.