Technician cost is a blended rate
Loaded cost differs substantially by technician: wage, burden, overtime, vehicle, tools, and certification. A blended rate makes senior-staffed jobs look better than they are and vice versa.
ERP by industry
Field service margin is decided by three things that happen in a van: how long the technician was actually on site, what parts came off the truck, and whether the work order was complete enough to bill. All three are captured in the field and most of them arrive in finance days later.
Send a month of work orders, technician hours, and parts usage. We will compute true job margin.
The problems
Field service management systems dispatch and schedule well. What they rarely do is tell you which jobs, contracts, and technicians made money.
Loaded cost differs substantially by technician: wage, burden, overtime, vehicle, tools, and certification. A blended rate makes senior-staffed jobs look better than they are and vice versa.
Parts leave the warehouse onto a van and are consumed on jobs. Where the consumption is not recorded against the job, inventory value drifts and job margin is fiction.
A two-hour job with ninety minutes of driving is a three-and-a-half-hour cost. Route density is the single largest lever on field margin and it is rarely in the number.
Preventive maintenance contracts are billed on a schedule and consumed unevenly. Which contracts and which sites lose money is discovered at renewal.
A work order missing a signature, a part number, or a meter reading cannot be billed. Every day it sits is a day of DSO on a business that pays technicians weekly.
A return visit to fix the first visit is cost with no revenue, and it is nearly always booked to the new work order rather than back to the original job.
Where the money goes
A representative shape for a field service business between $10M and $50M. Two of these six are usually missing from the job margin calculation entirely.
Nine points of revenue spent travelling between jobs is typical and it is the most improvable number in the business. It is also almost never in the job margin calculation, which means route density decisions are made on scheduling convenience rather than on the financial consequence — and a dispatcher optimising for the next hour has no visibility of the cost.
Your stack
ServiceTitan, Jobber, or whatever you dispatch with keeps doing that. What changes is that the financial consequence of each job becomes visible.
Benchmarks
Drawn from our own engagements with field service businesses between $10M and $50M. The bar is a typical erp.io customer after two quarters; the marker is the segment median.
Parts issued to a van are still inventory and are almost never treated as such. They leave the warehouse balance, arrive nowhere in particular, and are reconciled at a physical count that happens once or twice a year.
Treating each van as a stock location, with consumption recorded against the job at the time of use, does two things: inventory value stops drifting, and job margin includes the parts that were actually used rather than the parts that were quoted.
Technician cost varies more than most trades expect. Wage rates differ by experience and certification, overtime is frequent and unevenly distributed, workers compensation rates differ by classification, and vehicle and tool costs are real and allocable.
A blended rate applied across the roster systematically misstates job margin in the direction of whoever was staffed. Where the crew mix on a job varies — and it usually does — per-technician loaded cost is the difference between a margin figure that ranks jobs correctly and one that ranks staffing decisions.
Preventive maintenance contracts bill evenly and consume unevenly. A contract covering fourteen sites can be profitable overall while three of those sites are losing money on every visit — usually the ones with old equipment, difficult access, or a demanding contact.
Site-level contract margin is what makes renewal a pricing conversation rather than a reflex. It is also the analysis most likely to change what a business does rather than only what it knows.
A field service business pays technicians weekly and collects in thirty-five to fifty days. Every day a completed work order sits unbilled because a signature or a part number is missing is a day added directly to that gap.
Flagging incomplete work orders at the point of completion, while the technician is still on site, is a small intervention with a disproportionate cash effect. Our customers typically move from around half of work orders billed within forty-eight hours to close to ninety percent.
We do not dispatch, schedule, or route. ServiceTitan, Jobber, FieldEdge, and their peers do that considerably better than we would and we read from them rather than replacing them. We also have no depth in equipment manufacturing or fabrication — if you build what you install, Acumatica or NetSuite are better purchases. Our value here is the financial layer over an FSM you keep.
Questions
A month of work orders, hours, and parts usage is enough to compute true loaded margin.