Revenue per hour is the number most pest control owners never actually calculate
Two numbers you already have. Divide one by the other and you finally know whether a route made money or just stayed busy.
4 min read
What it actually is
Revenue per hour is not complicated. You take what a tech billed for the day and divide it by the hours they were on the clock. That is the whole thing. One number, and it means the same thing next to any other tech, any branch, any week.
Here is the part that gets people. You already have both numbers. Revenue sits in one report. Hours sit in another. Nobody ever does the division. So you can say who did the most stops and who booked the most money, and you cannot say who was actually good with their day. Those are not the same question. The money leaks out in the gap between them.
How to calculate it
Revenue divided by hours. A tech bills $1,400 across a nine hour day, that is about $155 an hour. Do it per tech, per day, then add it up to the branch.
Two things decide whether the number is telling the truth:
- Use billed revenue, the total on the tickets for the work that got done. Not what has been collected. Collections are a different fire with a different hose.
- Use the hours they actually clocked, not the hours you scheduled. Scheduled hours make a slow day look fine and hide the exact thing you are trying to find.
Why it beats stops and revenue on their own
A tech running a stack of cheap recurring stops looks great on volume and forgettable on revenue per hour. A tech running four fat initials looks slow on a stop count and turns out to be the most profitable person you have on the road.
Revenue per hour sees that. A stop count does not. That is the whole reason to bother with it. It rewards value per hour instead of motion.
What a good number looks like
Do not go find a benchmark online and chase it. Revenue per hour moves with your market, your price book, and your service mix, so a number that is great in one town is average in the next one over.
Set your baseline off your own last ninety days. Then watch two things: which way the number is trending, and the spread between your best tech and your worst. Dragging the bottom quarter up toward your own middle is worth more than hitting some magic dollar figure you read on a forum.
How it gets calculated wrong
Almost every homemade spreadsheet blows at least one of these:
- Scheduled hours mixed in with actual hours, so the bottom of the fraction is made up.
- Office and manager hours counted inside a field number they never worked.
- Collected revenue instead of billed, which drags your accounts receivable into a question that is not about accounts receivable.
- Two branches with different price books compared like a dollar of service means the same thing in both.
Common questions
What is the difference between revenue per hour and jobs per hour?
Revenue per hour is dollars produced per hour worked. Jobs per hour is stops completed per hour worked. One is about money, the other is about pace. Watch both, because a tech can be fast and cheap or slow and profitable.
Should I use billed or collected revenue?
Billed. Revenue per hour measures the work that got done. Collected revenue folds in payment timing and accounts receivable, which is a separate problem.
What hours go on the bottom of the fraction?
The hours the tech actually clocked, from your time tracking. Not scheduled hours. Scheduled hours make a light day look efficient and ruin the number.
See these numbers on your own branches
PestMetrics auto-syncs with FieldRoutes and your time tracking and does the math for you, per tech and per branch, reconciled to your books.
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