Hourly Technician Pay Rate
Overview
 

Table of Contents:

  1. Summary
  2. How to set the hourly rate?
  3. What options need to be selected for this feature to work?
  4. How will this information appear within the RO?
  5. What if I want to use this for my technicians, but they won’t clock in?
  6. Why does this go by “Service Hours” and not “Shift Clock Hours”?
  7. How do you estimate labor cost for Hourly technicians?
  8. Why are billed hours used at the Estimation phase?
  9. What happens if there was not a valid ‘Effective Date’ when a service was completed?

 

Summary:

The goal of this feature is to provide a more accurate labor cost accuracy and GP% on ‘Repair Order’ and ‘Service’ Financials. This is not used to track what a technician actually gets paid or to keep track of what work they are doing. 

 

How to set the hourly rate?

Within the ‘Technician Pay Calculator’ there will be a drop down, (currently defaulted to ‘Flat Rate’) just simply click on that and change it to ‘Hourly Rate’ as shown below.


 

 

What options need to be selected for this feature to work?

This feature relies on Technician Service Clocks being enabled to calculate labor costs as well as the permission to ‘View/Edit Payroll’ selected. The Account Owner is the one who will make these adjustments.

For Technician Service Clocks

  1. User Icon
  2. Account Settings
  3. Stay on Account Info
  4. Scroll down to Feature Options
  5. Enable Technician service clocks.

**NOTE: The ‘Service Clocks’ option above can be disabled while trying to use Hourly Pay Rates. However this would mean that your technicians cannot clock into a service. This equates to a $0 hourly labor cost.
 

Selecting the Permission for ‘View/Edit Payroll’

  1. Go to the User Icon
  2. Shop Settings
  3. Click on the appropriate Staff member
  4. Go to ‘Permissions’
  5. Scroll all the way down until you see a ‘Security’ area
  6. Enable the View/Edit Payroll option

Then Scroll down under ‘Permissions’ until you see Security


How will this information appear in an RO?
The hourly rate will change how Labor Cost is calculated as compared to Flat Rate technicians. This updated Labor Cost will be shown in ‘View Financials’
 

To navigate:
At the top of the RO, to the upper right, there are three dots in a circle - click on that.

Then click on ‘View Financials’


What if I want to use this for my technicians, but they aren’t clocking into the Service Clocks?
We recommended reminding your technicians that they need to clock in and out routinely for this feature to work.

 

Why does this go by “Service Hours” and not “Shift Clock” Hours?

This feature was designed to use Service Clocks in order to better determine how many hours a technician has spent on a single RO. Allowing for better accuracy on GP% per RO as well as letting Shop Owners know how much they are paying in labor costs.
 

Whereas Shift Clocks is for a technician who is clocking in and out for the day and for lunch. These shift clocks are not related to any service or RO, therefore cannot be calculated for any GP% or labor costs on any RO.

 

 

How do you estimate labor costs for hourly technicians?

We multiply the technician’s paid ‘Hourly Rate’ by the ‘Billed Hours’ if the service(s) haven’t been checked off, or “Finished” within the RO. This is because at the Estimation phase, service clocks will always be zero (because the work hasn’t been started yet), and it would falsely inflate GP% estimates to have a Labor Cost of $0.

 

Why are the ‘Billed Hours’ used in the Estimation phase?

If we use ‘Service Hours’ at the Estimate phase, before anyone has started the job, an Hourly technician’s Labor Cost would always be estimated at zero ($0). 

 

We use ‘Billed Hours’ as a proxy and multiply that by the tech’s’ Hourly Rate’. Once the service is checked off, we know exactly how many hours were spent on the service. From that point, we switch to using ‘Service Hours’ to calculate the Hourly Technician’s Labor Cost.


 

What happens if there was not a valid ‘effective date’ when a service was completed?

If there was no effective pay date, such as:

  • The technician does not have an effective date set at all 
  • The effective date is in the future
  • Or the effective date is in the past, yet the service was completed prior to the effective date. 

Then the program would use the default labor rate. 

 

As your technician’s pay rates’ change over time, a Shop Owner/Manager should continue to add new pay rates (with correct effective dates) and NOT delete or revise the old rates.