FieldTechSchedulerMargin per hour: the number that decides if a route stop is worth keeping
Ask a route owner which customers are their best and you'll hear the biggest monthly numbers: "the Hendersons, $260 a month." Ask which customers are most profitable and the honest answer is usually "no idea", because monthly revenue hides the two things that actually vary wildly from stop to stop: time and chemicals.
The formula
margin per hour = (revenue − chemical cost − loaded labor cost) ÷ hours on siteThree inputs, each with a trap in it:
1. Revenue: per month is fine, but count the visits
A $200/month pool serviced weekly is ~$46 a visit. The same $200 on a biweekly cadence is ~$92 a visit. Same monthly line on your P&L; twice the per-visit revenue. Every comparison has to happen at the visit level or the cadence difference silently distorts it.
2. Chemical cost: from doses, not vibes
If your techs record what they actually dose (and they should, since it's also how chemical billing and truck stock work), chemical cost per stop is just doses × your per-ounce cost. The spread is bigger than most owners expect: a shaded, covered pool might run $4/visit in chlorine while a full-sun pool with high bather load and low CYA runs $15+ in summer. On a $46 visit, that spread alone is a quarter of the revenue.
3. Loaded labor: the number everyone lowballs
Not the tech's wage. Wage plus payroll taxes, workers' comp, insurance, the truck payment, fuel, and benefits, divided over productive hours. A $22/hour tech typically costs $32–38/hour loaded. Using the wage instead of the loaded rate makes every stop look ~40% more profitable than it is, which is exactly how routes fill up with stops that lose money politely.
A worked example
| Henderson, "the big one" | Alvarez, "the little one" | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly / cadence | $260, weekly | $150, weekly |
| Revenue per visit | $60 | $34.60 |
| Chemicals per visit | $14 (full sun, heavy use) | $5 (screened, light use) |
| Time on site | 55 min (big deck, two bodies of water) | 18 min |
| Loaded labor @ $35/hr | $32 | $10.50 |
| Margin per visit | $14 | $19.10 |
| Margin per hour | ~$15/hr | ~$64/hr |
The "big" account earns a quarter of the small one, per hour of your company's life. That's not an argument for firing the Hendersons. It's an argument for repricing them, tightening the visit scope, or at minimum knowing which of the two you should clone when a referral comes in.
What to do with the ranking
- Bottom decile: reprice, don't rage-quit. A polite $30 increase either fixes the margin or frees the hour. Both outcomes win.
- Check cadence before price. A losing weekly stop is sometimes a fine biweekly stop.
- Watch time drift. A stop that crept from 20 to 35 minutes had a scope change nobody invoiced: a gate conversation, a vacuum that became routine. Real visit clocks catch it.
- Trust the flags. If a stop's time was estimated (the tech forgot to start the visit) or a dosed product has no cost configured, the number carries a caveat. Rank by clean numbers; fix the dirty ones.
Doing this in a spreadsheet takes an afternoon per month, which is why it doesn't happen. FieldTechScheduler's job costing computes margin per hour for every property automatically, from the visit clocks and doses your techs already record against labor rates you set once, sorted worst-first, with the honesty flags shown rather than hidden.