Auditing your canned jobs

A canned job library goes stale without anybody noticing, because a wrong entry still produces an estimate. The entries worth finding are the ones priced at an old labor rate, the ones named so vaguely that nobody selects them, and the ones covering work the shop stopped doing two years ago.

Key takeaways

• Coverage of your top twenty jobs matters more than the total entry count.
• A vague job name is the most common reason an entry never gets used.
• Entries carrying old labor rates keep quoting old prices until somebody looks.
• A stored parts cost that has drifted under your buy price eats margin with no symptom on the ticket.
• The canned job's wording is what the customer reads on the estimate.

Which entries are costing money?

The ones with stale pricing. A canned job stores a time and often a price, and neither updates itself when the shop's labor rate moves. Sort the library by the date each entry was last edited and start at the bottom. Anything older than your last rate change is quoting a rate you no longer charge.

What does one stale entry cost?

Run the subtraction on your own sheet. Take what the entry quotes today, take what your current rate would quote for the same hours, and multiply the gap by the number of tickets that entry carried in the last year. Do it again for every entry covering your bread-and-butter work.

Nobody catches it while it runs, because the entry works. It produces an estimate, the customer approves it and the ticket closes. Overcharging generates a phone call. Undercharging generates silence, which is why this is the failure that survives audits catching everything else.

Every hour of that gap also lands on your effective labor rate, which is where an owner eventually notices something is wrong without being able to say what. The effective labor rate calculator turns a month of tickets into that one number if you want to see the drift before you start the audit.

Why do good entries never get used?

Naming. An advisor searching for a brake job types brake, and an entry called Front brake service, pads and rotors, includes cleaning and lube comes up while one called BRK-FR-STD does not. Internal shorthand belongs in a code field and not in the name, because the name is both the search key and the line the customer reads.

The name is the line the customer reads

A canned job's name usually rides straight onto the estimate and then onto the invoice. That makes it a customer-facing document written by whoever set the entry up, on a day nobody remembers, for an audience they were not thinking about.

California is specific about what that document owes the customer. The invoice has to "describe all service work done and parts supplied", with the service work and the parts listed separately on it. The Federal Trade Commission tells customers to ask for a written estimate identifying the condition to be repaired along with the parts needed and the labor charge, and to expect that "the shop will contact you for approval before they do any work exceeding a specified amount of time or money".

An entry called BRK-FR-STD does none of that work. Rename it in the words a customer would use out loud. The advisor finds it in the search box and the disclosure takes care of itself.

What happens to the parts on a canned job?

They go stale twice over. The part number ages, because manufacturers retire numbers and roll them forward, which is what supersession does to a line you stored three years ago. The cost ages too, and the cost is the one that moves money.

A stored cost that has drifted below today's buy price keeps selling at the price it was set to, so the line lands well under the margin the parts matrix was built to produce and the estimate looks ordinary going out the door.

Nothing on the ticket flags that. The parts margin report catches it a month later at the summary level, by which point the answer is buried under a hundred other lines. If you want the conversion in front of you while you work the sheet, the markup versus margin calculator does it both directions.

One rule survives contact with a real library. Store parts on an entry when the part does not change with the vehicle. Store a cost only where a named person owns refreshing it. Everything else comes off the catalog at quote time, which is slower per job and right on the vehicle in front of you.

Diesel work is where this bites hardest, because the parts are large enough that one drifted cost outruns a week of correctly priced brake jobs. A fuel system job on a 6.7 Power Stroke or a Duramax carries more parts dollars on one line than most tickets carry in total.

Do two canned jobs on one ticket double-bill?

They can, and the library is where it starts. Two entries built independently for repairs living in the same corner of the engine each carry the same setup inside them. Put both on one repair order and the customer pays twice for draining the cooling system.

An advisor who knows the shop catches it and takes the time off by hand. The next advisor does not, and neither of them wrote down what the correct combined number was. R&R covers what overlap is and why published entries carry it. The audit's job here is narrower. Find the pairs your shop sells together. Decide once what the combined time should be, then build the combined entry so nobody is doing subtraction at the counter with a customer on hold.

The pairs are easy to find in a year of history. Sort tickets by RO number and watch for job names that keep landing next to each other. Whichever combinations come back repeatedly are the ones worth building.

How do you decide what to keep?

Count. Pull a year of tickets. Group by job name, then sort by how often each one appears. The top of that list is your real library, and it is usually shorter than the shop expects. The tail is where deletions live.

Deleting is where shops stall, so make the rule mechanical. An entry nobody used in a year and nobody can find by name comes out. Export the library first so every removal is reversible, then walk the deletion list past whoever writes the most tickets and let them veto three of them. Those vetoes tell you something the count could not, which is the work the shop still sells four times a year and would hate to price from scratch on a busy Friday.

What survives needs an owner. One person holds the sheet and re-prices the affected entries on the day the labor rate moves. A library with nobody's name against it drifts back to where it started inside of two rate changes, and the next audit costs the same afternoon over again.

The four-column pass

Put the library in a spreadsheet with four columns beside each entry and fill them from that same year of exported history. Your current labor rate goes at the top of the sheet. Take the last-edited date per entry too, if the system will give it to you.

Then read the sheet in order. Entries with a high use count and an old last-edited date come first, because those are quoting a retired rate on your most common work. Next is a zero use count sitting beside a name nobody would type, and that one gets renamed before anybody considers deleting it. Anything covering two vehicle classes gets split.

Where the system will not export job names at all, count by hand off the last month of tickets, tallying job names as you go. For everything the library does not cover, book time fills the gap.

What does a clean library change downstream?

It decides how much of an estimate can be built without a lookup. When a finding matches a canned job, the shop's own time and wording carry straight onto the ticket, and there is nothing left to price. When it does not, book time and a parts catalog fill the gap, which is slower and produces a line that reads less like the shop wrote it. The comparison between the two covers when each one wins.

Speed matters here for a reason beyond convenience. The priced document has to exist before anybody turns a bolt: California section 9884.9 requires a written estimated price for labor and parts, and says "no work shall be done and no charges shall accrue before authorization to proceed is obtained from the customer". A clean canned job library is how a shop produces that document while the customer is still on the phone, which is the argument for auditing the library rather than walking away from it.

What the audit does not fix

It will not tell you whether your labor rate is right. Nothing in this pass prices a job the shop has never done. And it is blind to an entry that was wrong from the day somebody typed it, because a time that was too generous closes every ticket without a complaint and leaves no trace in the history you are sorting. The labor guide entry covers what a published time includes before you lean on one.

Where does this fit with the rest?

Canned jobs are the first thing an automated draft reaches for, which is why how an estimate gets priced starts there too. The glossary defines the vocabulary, shop management system covers where the library lives, and the guides hub has the rest of the workflow.