Five Numbers a Mobile Fleet Shop Should Check Every Week

Most dashboards fail by saying too much. A mobile fleet shop can run a serious operation on five numbers checked once a week, ideally the same morning every week, with the same definitions every time.

1. Hours captured versus hours worked

How many tech hours existed last week, and how many ended up on invoices? This is the leak detector. If your techs worked 200 hours and you invoiced 150, you know exactly where to dig: travel, diag time, comebacks, or jobs that never got a ticket.

2. Work order to paid invoice, in days

Not job duration. The full cycle: from the moment work was requested to the moment money cleared. This number compounds everything: estimate approval lag, invoicing delay, payer speed. Shops that measure it shrink it. The shop Fleet Portal was built in cut it in half.

3. Receivables over 30 days, by payer

Total AR is a comfort number. AR aged past 30 days, listed by payer, is an action list. The conversation with a slow payer is easier at 35 days than at 95, and it only happens if the number is in front of you weekly.

4. Parts variance

What left the shelf versus what landed on invoices. If you can't measure it, that's itself the finding: parts are flowing outside the system. The fix is structural, not motivational. Parts should leave the shelf through the same system that bills them.

5. PM work as a share of total work

Preventative maintenance is the difference between scheduled revenue and surprise revenue. A rising PM share means calmer weeks, better margins, and clients whose trucks break less. If the share is stuck at zero, you're not selling maintenance, you're apologizing for breakdowns.

Make the numbers cheap to get

The reason most shops don't check these weekly is not laziness, it's that assembling them takes half a day of exports. The numbers have to be a tab, not a project. That's the standard to hold any shop system to, ours included: if a report takes longer to build than to read, it won't be read.