How do I know my real labor cost per job so I'm not pricing at a loss?
Log actual technician hours per job (not an estimate), multiply by your fully-loaded hourly labor cost (wage plus taxes and benefits), and add materials to get true job cost — then compare that to what you quoted. Do this by service type, since tint, PPF, and detail jobs eat very different amounts of labor time.
Most tint and PPF shops price off a rule of thumb: "sedans are about an hour and a half, trucks are two." That number was probably right once, but techs get faster on some jobs and slower on tricky ones, film costs change, and the shop never goes back to check. The gap between what a job actually costs in labor and what you assumed it costs is where quoted-profitable jobs quietly turn into break-even or loss jobs.
Why the answer is what it is
Estimated hours and actual hours drift apart fast
A job you price assuming 90 minutes of labor might routinely take 2 hours once you account for prep, re-dos, and interruptions. If nobody is logging actual time against the job, you never find out — you just keep quoting the same wrong number.
Your hourly labor rate needs to be fully loaded, not just wage
If a technician earns $22/hour but you're only pricing against that $22, you're missing payroll tax, workers' comp, and benefits, which commonly add 20-35% on top. Price against wage alone and every job is underpriced before the tech even picks up a squeegee.
Job-level cost, not shop-level average, is what tells you the truth
A monthly P&L can look fine while individual job types — say, tricky curved rear windows or ceramic PPF wraps — are consistently underpriced and dragging the average down. You only catch this by tracking cost per job, not cost per month.
Service types have very different labor profiles
Tint, PPF, and detail jobs take different amounts of technician time even at similar price points. Lumping them into one blended labor assumption hides which service line is actually profitable and which one is subsidized by the others.
Slow jobs are a staffing and training signal, not just a pricing one
When you track actual hours per job by technician, a pattern of one tech consistently running long on the same job type tells you where to focus training — which either speeds up delivery or tells you the price needs to go up to match the real time it takes.
What to look for
- Log actual clock-in/clock-out time per technician per job, not a flat estimate
- Add a fixed cost-per-hour for each technician (wage plus payroll tax and benefits load, not just hourly pay)
- Multiply logged hours by fully-loaded labor rate to get true labor cost for that specific job
- Add film, materials, and supply cost on top of labor to get full job cost, not labor alone
- Compare total job cost to the price you quoted to see real margin, not assumed margin
- Track this by service type (tint vs PPF vs detail) since labor time varies a lot between them
- Review technician-level job times monthly to catch jobs that are quietly running long
Related questions
What's a fully-loaded labor rate and why does it matter more than hourly wage?
It's the technician's hourly wage plus payroll taxes, workers' comp, and any benefits you cover, expressed as a true cost per hour worked. Pricing jobs against wage alone routinely understates real labor cost by 20% or more, which is often the entire margin on a job.
How often should I check labor cost per job type?
Monthly is a reasonable baseline for a small shop — often enough to catch a service type or technician drifting off your original time assumption before it costs you a season of underpriced jobs, without turning it into a daily chore.
Does SalesThumb track technician hours and labor cost automatically?
SalesThumb's technician mobile app lets techs clock in and out on a job with a tap, and the Sales Matrix is where you set labor and film pricing once per vehicle type so it's applied consistently. Reporting then shows revenue by service type and technician performance (jobs completed, revenue generated), and Business Analyst can answer plain-English questions about your margins grounded in your real numbers. SalesThumb is pre-launch, so treat this as what it's built to do rather than an existing track record.
How Roffik addresses this
The operating system for auto service shops — booking, CRM, AI photo-to-quote, payments, warranty certs, and a technician mobile app, all in one place. Learn more about SalesThumb.