KPI 1 — Revenue per crew per day
Formula: total revenue / (crews × working days). Benchmark: $1,200–$2,500/day for residential trades, $2,500–$5,000+ for commercial. This is the single best operational health metric — if it's rising you're doing things right, if it's flat or falling something is broken. To improve: optimize routes, push average ticket value up, reduce drive time between jobs.
KPI 2 — First-time fix rate
Formula: jobs completed in one visit / total jobs. Benchmark: 75–85% for most trades. Below 70% means you're losing money on second visits and customers are unhappy. To improve: pre-qualify jobs at booking, stock vans with common parts, train techs on the top 10 issues per service type.
KPI 3 — Days sales outstanding (DSO)
Formula: (accounts receivable / total billings) × days in period. Benchmark: under 15 days. Industry average is 28–45 days, which is brutal for cash flow. The full math of how much late invoices cost you. To improve: invoice on-site, accept one-click payments, save cards for recurring customers.
KPI 4 — Customer retention rate
Formula: customers who returned within 12 months / total customers from prior 12 months. Benchmark: 60–75% for trades with recurring work (HVAC, plumbing maintenance, lawn care); 25–40% for one-off-heavy trades (general contracting, remodeling). To improve: launch a maintenance plan, send seasonal reminders, use the client portal as a retention tool.
KPI 5 — Technician utilization
Formula: billable hours / total paid hours. Benchmark: 60–75% for residential trades. Below 50% means you're carrying too much idle time; above 80% means you're probably skipping training, admin, or vehicle maintenance and burning out crews. To improve: better scheduling, reduce drive time, dispatch by GPS proximity.
KPI 6 — Average response time
Formula: time from booking confirmation to job start. Benchmark: under 48 hours for routine, under 4 hours for emergency. Faster responses win more next-time bookings and convert more emergency calls. To improve: enable online booking with deposit, add automated dispatch rules, run on-call rotations.
KPI 7 — Average ticket value
Formula: total revenue / total completed jobs. Benchmark: varies wildly by trade — $200–$400 for routine plumbing, $1,500+ for HVAC equipment, $5,000+ for electrical service-panel upgrades. Trending up means your techs are pricing well and upselling appropriately. Trending down often means inconsistent pricing or excessive discounting. To improve: standardized pricebook, tech upsell training, value-based not hours-based pricing.
How to actually track these
A spreadsheet works at 1–3 crews. Beyond that, your field service software should have a dashboard with these KPIs auto-calculated. BOOTMARK's reporting suite ships all seven plus filters by crew, service type, and time range.
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