Estimate turnaround checklist

Run this over thirty consecutive tickets. The output is your own inspection-to-estimate spread, with enough recorded beside each row to see what the slow tickets have in common. Budget twenty minutes for the pull and the sort. Nothing here needs a report your shop system does not already produce.

Key takeaways

• Thirty consecutive tickets, not thirty you remember.
• Start the clock when the inspection is marked complete.
• Sort by elapsed time and read the slow end.
• Record the ticket details beside the time, or the number has no cause attached to it.

The measurement

Pull the inspection-complete timestamp and the estimate-sent timestamp for thirty consecutive tickets. Subtract. Sort the list from fastest to slowest and look at the bottom five.

Copy the header straight into a spreadsheet and fill one row per ticket:

ro_number,inspection_complete,estimate_sent,elapsed_minutes,job_count,parts_count,vehicle_familiar,hour_of_day

Why the gap between those two stamps matters

In California the written estimate has to exist before the work does. The repair dealer must "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 customer's consent. Look up your own state's requirement before relying on any of this; the checklist makes no claim about your jurisdiction.

Florida sets the same order of operations with a dollar threshold under it. Section 559.905 requires a written repair estimate whenever the repair work "will exceed $150 to the customer", and the customer has to hold a copy of that estimate "before repair work is begun."

California's Bureau of Automotive Repair states what has to happen in between. Its Write It Right guide tells repair dealers that "The authorization must be obtained and recorded on the estimate before beginning any repairs," and that an oral authorization is recorded as "the date, time, name of the person authorizing the repairs, and telephone number called, if any." A shop already keeping that has a third stamp available for free, which is the moment the customer said yes.

Wherever you are, the vehicle waits until the estimate exists. Every minute between those two timestamps is a bay holding a car nobody has authorized yet.

Where the two timestamps live

A system that stamps the inspection when the technician marks it complete, and stamps the estimate when it is first sent or shared, will carry both on the repair order's activity history. Export them if the system exports. Where it does not, one advisor writing the two times on a pad for a week gets you the same shape for more effort.

Record the ticket details next to the elapsed time. The elapsed number on its own gives you the size of the problem and says nothing about its cause.

What sits between the two timestamps

Five steps, and only the first one needs somebody who knows cars. Reading the findings and deciding which of them become jobs is judgment. Everything after that is lookup and typing, which is why the elapsed time tracks ticket size more closely than it tracks difficulty.

Book time resolves once per job. A parts list resolves once per part number, so a procedure that reads as one line on the ticket can put a long queue of lookups behind it. That is the arithmetic the third column is recording.

Reading the slow tail

Take the bottom five rows and look for what they share. Five tickets carrying parts counts well above your median point somewhere different from five unfamiliar vehicles, and five tickets that all landed between four and six in the afternoon point somewhere different again. Whichever column separates your slow five from your fast five is the one to work on, and that answer belongs to your shop rather than to anybody's rule of thumb.

Time on hold hides inside the elapsed number and nothing on the board records it. Where your slow rows carry long parts lists, note how much of the gap was an advisor waiting for a supplier to call back.

Reading the fast end

The top five are worth a minute as well. Whatever went out quickly is work your shop has already solved once. Read what those tickets carried and how they were priced, because that is the standard the slow tail is being measured against.

What the spread will not tell you

The measurement covers one advisor's queue over one stretch of days. A week with a technician out, or a week the counter ran short, moves the tail without saying anything about the pricing step. Take the tickets consecutively and note anything unusual beside the row instead of dropping the row.

The clock also stops the moment the estimate goes out. Whatever the customer takes to answer belongs to a separate measurement, and folding the two together hides the half of the day the shop controls.

Re-measure after you change one step

Change one thing, then run the same count again. A canned job added for the work you keep looking up moves one part of the tail. A second person on the counter through the afternoon block moves another. Two runs of the same measurement give the shop its own before and after on its own tickets.

What to fix first

Whichever step owns your tail. If it is the labor lookup, a canned job for the work you keep looking up is the fix, and the guide on auditing your canned jobs finds the ones you are missing. If it is the parts step, the work is in how the list gets built and priced, and how an estimate gets priced walks that sequence.

Cleaner findings shorten the first step, and how to write technician inspection notes covers what a finding has to carry. More on the tools hub.

Where should you read next?

This measures how long the estimate takes. The estimate builder shows the shape of the thing being built, on sample data.