How efficient is your workshop, really?

Is your garage making the most of its working day?

The diary is full, the ramps are occupied and everyone seems busy. But you get to the end of the week and wonder why all that work hasn’t turned into more money.

Time can disappear while you wait for parts, chase customer approval or finish a job that took longer than you quoted. You might also be doing work that never makes it onto the invoice.

The GarageWise Garage Efficiency Calculator helps you see where your workshop time goes and how much of it turns into labour sales.

You only need one normal week of figures to get started. Here is how to use it and what the numbers mean.

Start by replacing the example figures the calculator already contain. Type over these with your own figures, and the results update automatically.

Choose a reasonably normal week and use the same week for all your figures. If you are guessing any numbers, treat the results as a starting point until you have proper records.

There are eight boxes to complete:

1. Number of technicians

Enter the number of people available to work on customer vehicles. Someone working half a normal week counts as 0.5.

If you work on the tools yourself, include your workshop time too. Allow for the time you spend running the business, answering calls or dealing with customers.

2. Available hours per technician

This is the time each technician was available to work that week. Remove holidays, sickness, training and other time when they were genuinely unavailable.

Three technicians available for 40 hours each give you 120 available technician hours.

If everyone works different hours, make sure the technician number multiplied by the hours you enter matches your actual total. Avoid counting a part timer’s reduced hours twice.

3. Productive job hours

This means the time actually spent working on customer vehicles across the whole team.

It includes time spent diagnosing faults, servicing and carrying out repairs. Waiting for a parts delivery is not time spent working on the vehicle.

The simplest way to measure this is to record when each technician starts and stops working on each job. If three technicians spend 32 hours each on customer jobs, enter 96 hours.

4. Labour hours sold

These are the labour hours you charged customers for on completed jobs.

They can be different from the hours the work actually took. You might charge an agreed two hours for a job that takes an experienced technician an hour and a half. Equally, a job quoted at two hours might take three.

Use the hours actually billed. Keeping actual time and sold time separate is what makes the calculator useful.

5. Labour sales

Enter the value of your labour sales for the week, excluding VAT, parts, MOT fees and work carried out by subcontractors.

Use the labour value on your invoices after discounts. This is sales invoiced, rather than money arriving in the bank that week.

For a fixed price service that includes parts, you need the labour element rather than the full service price.

6. Advertised labour rate

Enter your normal hourly labour rate before VAT.

If you normally charge £85 plus VAT per hour, enter £85. The calculator compares this with what you actually achieve from your labour sales.

7. Target utilisation

Utilisation means the proportion of available time spent working on customer jobs.

This box lets you choose the level you want to reach. For example, 85% means 85 out of every 100 available technician hours would be spent on customer work.

The example target is not a rule for every garage. Set something realistic for your team and the work you do.

8. Working weeks per year

This tells the calculator how many weeks to use when turning a weekly improvement into an annual figure.

Use a realistic number of weeks for which your chosen week is representative, allowing for closures and quieter periods.

What do the results tell you?

The calculator shows four main measures. Each answers a different question.

1. Utilisation: how much of our available time goes on customer jobs?

If your team has 120 hours available and spends 96 hours working on vehicles, utilisation is 80%.

That leaves 24 hours outside customer job work. The calculator calls these “unproductive available hours”.

That wording does not mean everyone was standing around doing nothing. Cleaning, moving vehicles, dealing with deliveries and workshop admin all take time. The useful question is how much of that time could be reduced or better organised.

If utilisation is low, look for gaps in the diary, missing parts, delays getting approval or technicians waiting for the next job.

2. Technician efficiency: are we selling enough hours for the time jobs take?

The calculator divides labour hours sold by the actual time spent on jobs.

If your team works on vehicles for 96 hours and you sell 96 hours, efficiency is 100%.

If those jobs take 120 hours but you only sell 96, efficiency is 80%.

A lower figure could point to underestimated jobs, difficult diagnostics, missing tools, training needs or extra work that was never charged.

Efficiency can also exceed 100%. If an agreed two hour job takes an hour and a half, you have sold more hours than it took to complete. That can reflect experience and good equipment, while still completing the work properly.

3. Overall workshop productivity: how much of our total available time turns into sold hours?

This brings the first two measures together.

If you have 120 hours available and sell 96 hours, overall productivity is 80%.

It helps explain why keeping everyone occupied does not automatically produce strong labour sales. You need both enough customer work and enough hours charged for that work.

4. Labour rate recovery: are we actually achieving our hourly rate?

Your advertised rate tells you what you intend to charge. Your effective rate tells you what you actually achieve per sold hour.

For example, £7,680 of labour sales divided by 96 sold hours gives an effective rate of £80.

If your advertised rate is £85, your labour rate recovery is about 94%.

Discounts, fixed price jobs and reductions to labour charges can all affect this. A different mix of charge rates can also explain the gap. The point is to understand it rather than assume every sold hour earns your headline rate.

What could a small improvement be worth?

The calculator also shows the extra work you could sell if you reached your utilisation target.

Suppose you have 120 available hours and currently spend 96 on customer jobs. That is 80% utilisation.

Reaching 85% would give you another six productive hours a week. At 100% technician efficiency and £85 per hour, that represents £510 in additional weekly labour sales. Across 48 weeks, it comes to £24,480.

That is potential extra sales. Your profit would depend on any additional costs, and you still need enough customer work to fill those hours.

The calculation assumes your current technician efficiency continues and that the extra hours sell at your advertised rate. If you regularly achieve a lower rate, the extra sales would also be lower.

The comparison table shows the same calculation at different utilisation levels. Levels at or below your current utilisation show zero additional opportunity.

Turn the figures into one useful change

The calculator suggests where to focus first: utilisation, technician efficiency or labour rate recovery.

Use that as a starting point for looking at what happened during the week. Ask the team what held jobs up. Recording a reason whenever someone is off a customer job for more than ten minutes can help you spot recurring problems.

You might find that ordering parts earlier, getting customer approval sooner or recording extra labour properly makes the biggest difference.

Keep measuring consistently. Jobs started in one week and invoiced in the next can distort a single week’s results, so look at the pattern over several weeks before drawing conclusions.

You can also request the spreadsheet from the calculator page and keep a weekly record.

Your workshop only has so many hours available. Knowing where those hours go helps you make better decisions about bookings, pricing, equipment and staffing, and get more from the work your team already does.

Try the GarageWise Garage Efficiency Calculator.