Canned job vs labor guide time

Both produce a labor number a shop can defend. A canned job carries the shop's own time, rate and wording, so it wins whenever one exists. Published book time covers everything the shop has not quoted before, which on a busy ticket is most of the long tail.

Key takeaways

• Canned job first, book time as the fallback. That order is the whole answer.
• A canned job carries wording the customer has seen before.
• Book time is looked up against the exact year, make and engine.
• A large gap between the two usually means the canned job is priced stale.

What does each one give you?

Why does either number exist?

Because a customer has to be able to say yes to a price before a technician picks up a tool. California Business and Professions Code section 9884.9 puts it in law: the repair dealer "shall give to the customer a written estimated price for labor and parts necessary for a specific job", and "no charge shall be made for work done or parts supplied in excess of the estimated price ... without the oral or written consent of the customer."

Florida makes the basis itself a disclosure. On any repair over $150 the written estimate has to carry "a statement as to whether the customer is being charged according to a flat rate or an hourly rate, or both". A canned job and a published book time are both flat-rate numbers, so a shop quoting from either one is using a labor basis a Florida customer is entitled to see named on the paper.

Both sources on this page exist to make that possible. A canned job is a price the shop already agreed with itself. Book time is a price somebody published so a shop could quote a job it has never seen.

When does the canned job clearly win?

Repeat work is the whole answer here. Front brakes on a common truck, a standard service interval, anything the shop quotes weekly. The library already holds the time, the parts and the wording, so nobody has to look anything up or interpret anything. The guide on auditing your canned jobs covers keeping that library worth reaching for.

When do you need book time instead?

Anything unfamiliar sends you to the guide. A vehicle the shop rarely sees, an operation nobody has priced, a job that appeared halfway through an inspection. The lookup needs the exact year, make and engine, because a 6.7 and a 6.2 in the same body do not share an operation time. The glossary entry on book time covers what the number includes.

Is one of them more accurate?

Neither, and the publishers are open about it. Mitchell 1's labor times page states that its labor guides "are still estimates that may contain individual errors." A published time is a considered estimate for a vehicle. A canned job is what your bays have learned about the same work.

So a shop that beats published time every week on a job it runs every week has not found an error. It has found out what the job takes in its building, with its technicians and its tools, and that is worth writing down.

What do you do when they disagree?

Look at the canned job first. A canned job that is dramatically cheaper than book time is usually priced under a labor rate the shop no longer charges, and a canned job that is dramatically more expensive usually covers a heavier vehicle class than the one on the ticket. Neither case is a reason to override the number silently.

Overriding on the ticket fixes one estimate and leaves the entry to do the same thing on the next one. The fix belongs in the library, and the two-minute version is to open the entry, check the labor rate it was built at, check what vehicle class it assumes, then save it and move on.

What makes a canned job go stale?

A labor rate change does most of the damage, because the entry keeps quoting the old rate and nothing in the system raises a hand about it. Parts pricing drifts the same way as soon as a supplier moves or a line card changes.

The third cause is quieter and it costs more. An entry gets built for a half-ton, then somebody sells it against a three-quarter-ton because the description matched, and the hours were never right for that vehicle. Nobody catches it, because the ticket closed and the customer paid.

Give the library one owner and a review date. A file everybody can edit and nobody audits fills up with entries somebody built in a hurry for one ticket, and those entries go on quoting for years. The four-column pass in auditing your canned jobs runs in an afternoon.

How do you find the stale ones without reading the whole library?

Sort by what you sell, then check from the top.

The entries that matter are the ones landing on tickets every week, and there are fewer of those than the size of the library suggests. Pull a list of the entries your shop reached for over the last quarter, take the top of that list, and check those against your current labor rate and a fresh supplier price. Everything below is a long tail you can leave alone until it comes up.

Two checks catch most of it. Does the hours figure still match what the job takes in your bays? Does the parts line still name something your counter can get this week? An entry that fails either one is quoting a shop that no longer exists.

What happens to the wording?

The canned job carries it, which is the part shops underrate.

A customer reading "Front brake service, both sides" understands what they are buying. A line generated off an operation name reads like it came out of a manual, because it did. Work priced from a labor guide gets whatever description the system produces, and an advisor either rewrites it by hand or sends something the customer has to ask about.

So the wording is a pricing decision as much as the hours are. An entry that quotes correctly and reads badly still costs you the call.

What should be inside a canned job?

The hours, the parts and the words, all three priced the way the shop prices them.

The hours are the part shops get right. The parts are where entries rot, because a job built with one brand on it keeps quoting that brand after the counter switched suppliers. The words are the part nobody reviews at all, and they are the only part the customer reads.

Build the entry off a ticket you already closed and were happy with. That gives you real parts, real hours and wording somebody already used on a phone call successfully. Building one from scratch in a quiet moment produces an entry that has never met a customer.

Keep the scope tight. An entry that covers front brakes on one class of vehicle prices cleanly every time. An entry called "brake service" that somebody applies to anything with a wheel on it will be wrong more often than it is right, and the wrongness is invisible because the ticket still closes.

When should the labor guide win anyway?

When the vehicle is not the vehicle the entry was built for.

A canned job carries no engine check of its own. Somebody built it for a platform and the system will happily apply it to a heavier one, so a shop leaning on the library for work outside its usual board is quoting from memory with extra steps. The guide handles that case properly, because the lookup starts from the year, make and engine in front of you.

The same applies to a vehicle the shop has not seen in years. The entry may be older than your current labor rate, in which case the guide gives you a cleaner starting point than a price nobody has looked at since.

How does an automated draft choose?

Canned job first, then book time. That order keeps the estimate reading like the shop's own work and leaves the labor guide to cover the gap. More on that sequence in how an estimate gets priced, and auditing your canned jobs is how you find out which side of the line your work falls on. The rest of the comparisons are on the compare hub.