Most detailing shops track one number: what came in this month. It's the least useful number available, because it tells you nothing about whether the work was worth doing.
Revenue is an outcome. These nine are inputs — the things you can actually change on a Tuesday. None of them requires accounting software, and every one can be read in under a minute once it's being recorded.
1. Revenue per billable hour
Not revenue per job. Not revenue per day. Revenue divided by the hours your people actually spent producing work.
A $2,800 coating over 18 hours is $156/hour. A $180 maintenance detail over 1.5 hours is $120/hour. A $95 express wash over 40 minutes is $142/hour.
Ranked by revenue, the coating wins by a mile. Ranked by revenue per hour, the express wash is nearly as good and ties up a bay for a fraction of the time.
This one number reorders most shops' opinion of their own service menu within a month.
2. Cost of labour per job
What the person doing the work earned on that specific car — not your total payroll, not an average.
You need this per job because averages hide the problem. A shop with 55% labour cost overall might have retail work at 40% and dealer work at 75%, and the only way to see that is to record the payout on the job when the work is priced.
If you take one thing from this list, take this one. It's the number that turns "we're busy" into "we're busy doing the wrong work".
3. Gross margin by service type
Revenue minus direct labour minus materials, expressed as a percentage, grouped by what the service is.
Run it for a quarter and most shops find one or two services that look like flagship work and earn almost nothing. Usually it's whatever is priced by competitive pressure rather than by cost — often correction, often anything sold as a "package".
You don't necessarily drop those services. Sometimes they're the reason customers walk in. But you should know you're subsidising them, deliberately.
4. Rework rate
Cars that came back. Count them, as a percentage of jobs completed.
Rework is doubly expensive: you pay the labour twice and you've spent the customer's goodwill. A shop at 2% has a quality process. A shop at 8% has a training problem, a piece-rate incentive problem, or both — and it's paying for it out of margin without ever seeing a line item for it.
Track who the rework came from too, but keep that conversation about process rather than blame, or people will simply stop telling you.
5. Booked capacity, two weeks out
What percentage of your available hours are already committed for the next fortnight.
Below 50% and you have a marketing problem you should be acting on today, not when the week is empty. Above 90% and you have a pricing problem — you're the cheapest option in your market and you should test a rise.
This is the earliest warning signal in the whole list. Revenue tells you what already happened; booked capacity tells you what's about to.
6. Unassigned and overdue jobs, right now
Not a monthly figure. A live count.
A job with nobody assigned to it will be missed. A job past its promised time that nobody has flagged is a customer who is about to call. Both are entirely preventable and both are invisible on any monthly report.
This is the one number that belongs on a screen you look at every morning rather than in a report you read every month. Concorso puts overdue and unassigned above the day's schedule for exactly that reason — they're the two problems you can still fix.
7. Average job value, and where it's moving
Total revenue divided by number of jobs, tracked as a trend rather than a snapshot.
A flat average with rising job counts means you're working harder for the same money. A rising average with flat counts means your upselling or your pricing is working.
The useful version splits retail from dealer work, because dealer units drag the average down by design and mixing them hides what retail is doing.
8. Quote-to-job conversion
Of the quotes you sent last month, what fraction turned into work.
Below about 30% and you're either quoting the wrong customers or your quotes are arriving too slowly. Above 80% and you're almost certainly too cheap — a shop that wins nearly everything it quotes is leaving money on every job.
The related number, and often the more actionable one: time from enquiry to quote sent. In this trade the first credible quote wins a disproportionate share of the work, and most shops lose jobs to a competitor who simply replied faster.
9. Cash actually collected versus invoiced
For retail work these are nearly the same number. For dealer work they are emphatically not.
Track outstanding receivables and how old they are. A shop doing $40,000 a month with $55,000 outstanding is not a healthy shop, however good the revenue line looks — it's financing its customers' cash flow out of its own working capital.
Sort by age and chase the oldest first. Most late dealer invoices aren't disputes; they're a missing PO number or a wrong reference sitting silently in someone's system.
Reading them together
Individually these are just metrics. Together they answer specific questions:
- Revenue per billable hour + gross margin by service → which work to sell more of
- Cost of labour per job + rework rate → whether your pay structure is working
- Booked capacity + conversion rate → whether to market or to raise prices
- Unassigned/overdue + collected vs invoiced → what's leaking today
Four questions, nine numbers, and not a chart among them.
Start with two
Nobody implements nine metrics at once and sustains it. Start with cost of labour per job and revenue per billable hour, because between them they answer the largest question a shop owner has — which of the work we do is actually worth doing.
Both require the same discipline: recording, at the moment work is priced, what the customer pays and what the person doing it earns. Once those two numbers live on the job, most of the rest of this list becomes a matter of adding up records you already have rather than starting a new spreadsheet.
See what Concorso shows you — the day's problems above the schedule, and the period's numbers underneath, with a payout on every line of work.