1. Your week

Pick one normal week. Not the quietest, not the week the MOT tester was off. Labour only, excluding VAT and parts.

Number of technicians

Part timers count as a fraction, e.g. 0.5.

Available hours per technician

Rostered hours for the week, less holiday, sickness and training.

Productive job hours

Time actually spent working on customer vehicles, across all technicians.

Labour hours sold

Labour hours charged to customers on completed jobs.

Labour sales

Excluding VAT, parts, MOT fees and subcontract work.

Advertised labour rate

Per hour, excluding VAT. Not sure what it should be? Use the labour rate calculator.

Target utilisation

Your own target. There is no universal benchmark, and anyone who quotes one is guessing.

Working weeks per year

Used to turn the weekly opportunity into an annual figure.

Available technician hours this week

Unproductive available hours

2. What if your utilisation were different?

Same team, same efficiency, same advertised rate. Only the share of available time spent on customer jobs changes.

Utilisation	Extra sold hours per week	Extra labour sales per year

Rows below your current utilisation show £0 because there is nothing to gain by going backwards.

3. How to measure each number

The numbers only mean something if you collect them the same way every week.

Available hours: Start with rostered technician hours. Remove annual leave, sickness, training and any other time the technician was genuinely unavailable.
Productive job hours: For one week, record the start and stop time of every customer job. Count only time actually spent working on the vehicle.
Sold hours: Add up the labour hours charged to customers on completed jobs. If you use standard repair times, use the hours actually billed.
Labour sales: Labour revenue excluding VAT and parts. Leave out MOT fees, subcontract work and parts unless you deliberately want them in the measure.
Lost time: Ask technicians to note a reason whenever they are off a customer job for more than ten minutes. The usual suspects are parts, authorisation, no job ready, moving vehicles, admin, tooling and rework.
Target utilisation: Your own target for the share of available technician time spent on productive customer work.

A weekly routine that takes twenty minutes

Reconcile technician available hours for the week.
Total the clocked productive job time.
Total the labour hours sold on completed jobs.
Total labour sales, excluding VAT and parts.
Review the lost time reasons, then pick one operational issue to fix next week.

GarageWise records labour hours sold and labour sales on every job sheet, so two of the four numbers come straight off the week's invoices.

Your workshop this week

Utilisation
Technician efficiency
Overall workshop productivity
Labour rate recovery

Capacity opportunity at utilisation

Extra productive hours per week
Extra sold hours per week
Extra labour sales per week

Annual labour sales opportunity

A capacity illustration, not a profit forecast. It assumes your current efficiency and advertised rate hold while utilisation rises to your target.

Get this as a spreadsheet

GarageWise Ltd accepts no liability for any errors, inaccuracies or losses arising from the use of this calculator; results are provided for guidance only and should not be relied upon as financial advice.

Notes and assumptions

The example figures are illustrative for a three technician independent garage. They are not benchmarks, and your own numbers will differ.
These measures only work if you use the same definitions every week. Measuring consistently matters more than any industry figure.
Technician efficiency can legitimately exceed 100% when the labour hours sold are more than the productive time the job actually took.
The tool lets you set your own utilisation target on purpose. It does not claim a universal benchmark.
Labour sales exclude VAT, parts, MOT fees and subcontract work unless you choose to include them.
Once you know your utilisation, the labour rate calculator will tell you what that utilisation means for the rate you need to charge.

How efficient is your workshop, really?