Reporting Automation for Plumbing Companies

Cost Per Lead Is the Wrong Headline Number

Ask a plumbing owner how the business is doing and you will usually get revenue, and maybe a cost per lead from whoever runs the ads. Neither number tells him what he actually needs to know, which is whether his trucks spent today making money. A shop with four trucks has roughly thirty-two to forty technician-hours to sell each day, and the whole enterprise is a bet on how many of those hours end up billable. A cheap lead that turns into a forty-minute drive to a $180 drain call that the tech could not complete on the first visit is a worse outcome than an expensive lead that turns into a $900 hydro jetting job eight minutes from the shop. Cost per lead cannot see that difference. Plumbing reporting automation exists to surface the numbers that can — revenue per truck-hour, drive time as a share of the day, first-time fix rate, and average ticket by job type — and to put them in front of the owner without anyone building a spreadsheet on a Sunday.

Revenue per Truck-Hour, per Truck

This is the number the entire operation should be steered by, and it is calculated simply: billed revenue on a truck divided by the hours that truck was on the clock. Reported per truck, per week, it exposes things that no other view will. One tech is producing forty percent more per hour than another on identical job mixes, which is either a training gap or a closing gap and is worth knowing which. One truck is consistently assigned the low-ticket work because the dispatcher trusts that tech with difficult customers, which is a well-meaning habit that is quietly costing the shop thousands a month. Two trucks are crossing the same territory every morning because the board is built by hand in the order the calls came in. None of that appears in a revenue total. All of it appears the moment revenue is divided by hours and broken out by vehicle.

Drive Time Is the Cost Nobody Bills

Drive time is the largest unbilled expense in a plumbing business and it is almost never measured. A tech who spends two hours a day in the truck across four calls has lost a quarter of his productive capacity to the road, and at $75 to $150 an hour that is real money evaporating daily. Reporting has to capture drive time as a first-class metric — total minutes, minutes per job, and the worst-offending routes — because that is what makes the case for drive-time-aware scheduling instead of first-come-first-served dispatching. It also exposes the service-radius question honestly. Shops routinely take jobs forty-five minutes outside their zone because the phone rang and turning down work feels wrong, and only a report showing what those jobs actually netted after the round trip will convince an owner to draw a boundary and hold it.

First-Time Fix Rate and the Cost of the Second Roll

A job that requires a second visit costs the shop an entire unbilled truck roll, and in a business where the constraint is technician hours, that is the most expensive failure mode there is. First-time fix rate should be tracked per tech, per job type, and — critically — against what the intake notes said. Most repeat rolls trace back to one of three causes: the diagnosis captured on the phone was wrong, so the wrong equipment went out; the part was not on the truck; or the job was outside that tech's licensing or skill. Each has a different fix, and only a report that separates them will tell you which one is bleeding you. When the data shows that a third of main-line calls are coming back because a hand auger was sent to jobs that needed a jetter, the fix is at intake, in the fields described in our plumbing CRM and job pipeline automation — not in the truck.

Average Ticket by Job Type, and What It Says About Your Mix

Plumbing job costing reports get genuinely interesting when revenue is broken out by the work itself, because the spread in this trade is enormous. A standard service call sits at $150 to $500. Routine drain cleaning runs $150 to $350, while hydro jetting the same line runs $350 to $1,000. Water heater repair is $150 to $750; a tank replacement is $1,200 to $2,500 and a tankless conversion $2,500 to $5,600. A sewer replacement is $3,000 to $8,000 and a full repipe anywhere from $3,900 to over $20,000 depending on PEX versus copper and whether a slab has to be opened. When a shop sees its mix laid out this way, the strategic questions ask themselves. If the trucks are full of $200 drain calls and the shop has run four sewer camera inspections all quarter, the problem is not lead volume — it is that nobody is converting the diagnostic opportunity sitting in every one of those drain calls into the higher-ticket work the customer probably needs.

Marketing Source Tied to Job Value, Not Job Count

The only honest way to evaluate a marketing channel in this trade is by what it actually produced in booked revenue, net of the hours it consumed. A channel delivering thirty cheap leads a month that book at twenty percent into $200 jobs is worth far less than one delivering six leads a month that book into water heater replacements, and a cost-per-lead comparison will rank them exactly backwards. Plumbing reporting automation stitches the lead source through the CRM to the closed invoice, so every channel is reported on revenue booked, close rate, average ticket, and — where the shop bothers to track it — the estimates it generated that are still open. That last column matters more than it looks, because a channel that produces high-ticket estimates which then die unattended is not a bad channel; it is a follow-up failure, and the fix is in our plumbing lead and estimate follow-up automation, not in the ad account. Tying marketing source to job value is the only way to tell whether the best plumbing seo services are earning their retainer.

The Report Nobody Reads and How to Fix It

A dashboard with forty metrics on it gets opened twice and abandoned, which is how most contractor reporting projects end. What actually gets used is a short weekly summary that lands in the owner's inbox on Monday morning with five numbers on it: revenue per truck-hour by vehicle, drive time percentage, first-time fix rate, open estimate value over $2,500, and booked revenue by source. Each one should be paired with last week's figure so the direction is obvious at a glance. Anything deeper lives one click away for the week the owner wants to dig. The point of plumbing job costing reports is not comprehensiveness — it is that somebody actually looks at them and changes a dispatch decision because of what they saw. The framing for the whole system is on the plumbing automation hub. Trades measured on crew hours rather than lead counts hit the same reporting wall, which is why our automation service for window and door contractors is built around the same install-hour economics.