Check Out The Technician Sales Summary

One of the hardest challenges any company faces is tracking the output of their technicians and keeping them motivated. It is easy to believe that technicians with more knowledge and experience are more valuable than those with less, but is that always true?

Certainly these things play a part. In a perfect world a technician with more experience would fix jobs in half the time of a less experienced worker thereby making the company more profitable and the employee more valuable. Many times, however, your most experienced technician is not the most profitable technician. To get a true sense of a technician's profitability, we highly recommend you run the Technician Sales Summary report.

This report can be found by clicking the Sales pull-down menu and selecting Reports, then Technician Sales Summary. Simply supply the report with a date range and click Preview to get a look at how ALL of your technicians compare against each other in the following areas:

• Total revenue
• Number of invoices
• Average revenue
• Gross profit
• Hours worked on dispatches
• Profit per hour

No more guessing, just straight out performance metrics. This is a perfect report to hang in the break room on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis to generate a little healthy competition between your technicians. You can even choose to sort the report by Profit Per Hour or Average Revenue, so that everyone can see who is top dog and who needs to step up their efforts.

Now before you post it, lets take a quick look at how these figures are generated. A technician gets credit for an invoice if they appear on the Technicians tab of the invoice. The pre-tax invoice total is multiplied by the percentage of credit listed on that tab to calculate that technician's revenue. The percentage of credit is calculated automatically based on the technicians you assigned to the associated dispatch and the amount of time they worked on the dispatch. So if you had two technicians on the job and one worked 2 hours while the other worked one - the first technician would receive 67% credit and the other would get 33% by default. Of course, you can always change these values manually when creating the invoice. You can even give both technicians 100% credit if you wish.

The Technicians tab is also where the technician's total hours are calculated. Note that this amount is coming from the dispatch and shows the actual time worked, not billed. The hours can be manually modified on this screen, if desired, although that change will NOT carry back to the dispatch.

If you are logged into the Admin account or have full privileges, you will also see the employee's labor and overhead values listed on the Technicians tab. This is a vital part of calculating their gross profit and profit per hour, so if the rates are zero, be sure to go to Dispatch → Enter Technicians and modify the technician' pay rate and overhead amounts so that this calculates properly.

Of course, profitability and performance metrics only tell part of the story; attitude, punctuality, customer service skills, and yes, even experience are all worth considering when evaluating your employees. Still, this is a fantastic way to give the technicians some quantifiable data on how they are doing and hopefully inspire a little healthy competition as well.

Written by Eric Rausin
Featured in January 2012 Newsletter