Job costing: what each repair actually made

Most shops price service off a menu: a basic tune, a full overhaul, a wheel true, a hydraulic bleed. The menu is right on average and wrong on the bikes that matter. The overhaul on a clean road bike takes ninety minutes. The overhaul on a winter commuter with a seized seatpost and a cracked bottom bracket shell takes four hours, and the menu price was the same.

Job costing is how you find those bikes. Every work order carries three kinds of cost against its price: the mechanic time spent on it, the parts that went into it, and any expenses you paid for it, such as a courier or an outside wheel build. Subtract them from what the customer paid, and you have the margin on that one repair.

Seen across a month, those numbers tell you which menu items to raise, which mechanics are fast on which jobs, and whether e-bike diagnostics are paying their way. That is the purpose of the planned job-costing view.

The labor side is built on technician time tracking, which is live. A mechanic clocks in against the visit when the bike goes in the stand and clocks out when it comes out, so the hours already sit on the job. Interruptions, such as answering the phone or helping on the counter, go to shop time or a break so they do not inflate the repair. What job costing adds is a cost rate for each person to turn those hours into dollars.

Each mechanic has a cost rate, meaning what an hour of their time actually costs you, separate from the labor rate you charge. The job cost multiplies one by the other. A senior mechanic may cost more per hour and finish the bleed in half the time, and job costing will show you both sides of that.

The field app that carries the clock is a web app you install to the home screen, not a native app. There is no background GPS tracking; a foreground check-in when a van tech opens a job is planned.

The parts side depends on parts inventory. When a chain is received on a purchase order, its cost is recorded. When the same chain is consumed on a work order, that cost moves with it. The job cost shows what the chain cost you, not what you sold it for, which is the only way the margin number means anything.

Until inventory ships, the plan allows expenses to be recorded against a job, with a photo of the receipt. That covers the special-order part bought on a card at the distributor counter or the tubeless tire picked up from another shop on a Saturday morning.

Supplier invoices can also be matched to the purchase order that ordered the parts, so you can compare what you expected to pay with what you were billed. The payable itself sits in erp.io Accounting.

Job costing is only useful if it changes a decision. The ones it tends to change in a bike shop are the price of the menu items that run long, the minimum charge on a walk-in flat fix, whether to keep doing wheel builds in-house, and how much to charge for e-bike diagnostic time that currently goes unbilled.

It also answers staffing questions honestly. If one mechanic consistently closes overhauls with a healthy margin and another does not, the answer might be training, a tool, or a mismatch of jobs to skills. Courses, the erp.io training module, is live and is where you would write your shop standard for that work.

None of these views exist yet. When they do, the Service plan puts them on the work order first and in the reports second, because the moment to notice a job running over is before the invoice, not at the end of the month.