Field service time tracking: the hour on the job, not the hour on the timesheet
- Service order total
- $312.25
- Travel
- $12.60
- Labour on site
- $142.50
Every figure on this page is computed from the inputs entered, by the method stated below it. Jobcardo publishes no tax rate, no wage figure and no trade standard: the rate, the markup and the tax on the parts line are yours, and the defaults are a worked example to replace with your own figures.
Field service time tracking exists to answer one question the payroll timesheet cannot: how long did this job take. A timesheet says a technician worked nine hours; it does not say that four of them were on one call that was quoted for two. Without the job-level figure, every estimate is built from an impression, and the jobs that lose money are invisible because the week as a whole looked busy and profitable.
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Track against the job, not against the day
The technician starts and stops on the order rather than on a shift. Travel between jobs is its own state, so travel can be seen and priced rather than hidden inside labour. The day still totals for payroll; the job now totals for the estimate.
Use the burdened rate or the number means nothing
Wages plus payroll taxes, insurance, holiday and non-productive time is what an hour actually costs. Job costing built on the bare wage understates every job by roughly the same margin and makes the comparison between jobs meaningless as well as flattering.
Feed it back into the next estimate
The point of the measurement is the next quote. A firm that knows its real hours for the ten jobs it does most often prices from evidence while its competitors price from memory, and it knows which work to decline.
Field service time tracking: common questions
Do technicians resent job-level tracking? Less than they resent being blamed for a job that was mis-quoted. Introduce it as estimating data rather than as supervision, keep the interaction to two taps, and it survives; introduce it as oversight and the data quality follows the resentment.
What about travel time? Track it separately. It is real cost, it is often a third of a short-call day, and averaging it into job labour hides the single biggest lever a dispatcher has.
Does this replace the payroll timesheet? It can feed it, which is the ideal, but the two answer different questions. Payroll needs the day; estimating needs the job. One entry that produces both is the version worth having.
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