Labor utilization tells you how much of your paid installer time is actually generating revenue. Most shops are at 55-70% — meaning a third of installer hours are dead time. Closing even half that gap is huge.
What utilization means
Utilization = (billable installer hours) / (total installer hours on the clock), per day, per installer, per bay.
Billable hours = time spent on a customer job that was eventually invoiced and paid.
NOT billable: prep, cleanup, slow days, lunch, training, fixing mistakes from yesterday, redoing a customer's car, idle waiting between jobs.
Open the report
Reports → Operations → Labor utilization. Default view shows trailing 14 days. Toggle to 30 or 90 for longer views.
What's healthy
- Tint shop, 1-3 bays: 65-80% utilization typical
- PPF/ceramic, 1-3 bays: 70-85% (longer jobs, less changeover)
- Multi-bay tint or detail: 60-75% (more changeover, more bay-switching)
- Mobile detail: 55-70% (driving time eats into it)
Below 50%, you have a real problem — usually undersold pipeline or massive over-scheduling-buffer.
Above 90% sustained means you're under-staffed and burning your team out.
Reading the slice views
- By hour of day — when are bays empty? Most shops have a midday lull (1-3pm) and a late-day cliff (after 5pm).
- By day of week — Mondays and Fridays often run lower. Saturdays are usually peak.
- By installer — top performers should be 10-15 points above the shop average. Bottom should be flagged for re-training.
- By bay — one bay always lower? Usually a tooling, lighting, or layout issue.
The four hour problem
Most shops have ~4 hours per week per installer of recoverable dead time. Common sources:
1. Job changeover — between vehicles, 20-40 minutes of dead time. Fix: stage the next vehicle while current one is mid-install. Saves 10-15 min/changeover. 2. Photo capture skipped or delayed — installer rushes the cleanup, captures photos later, then has to chase them down. Fix: lock photo capture into the workflow so it happens at the bay. 3. Reschedule churn — customer no-shows or cancels, gap not filled. Fix: maintain a 3-5 customer standby list of last-minute fills. 4. Wrong-vehicle prep — installer preps for the wrong service or wrong film. Fix: pre-install confirmation step (installer reads back the job, customer confirms, system locks).
Each of those is 30-60 minutes per week per installer. Closing all four is 2-4 hours.
What NOT to track here
- Sick days / PTO — these aren't dead time, they're allowed. The report should exclude PTO from total hours, not count them as low utilization.
- Training time — same. Training hours should be tagged and excluded from the billable denominator.
If your numbers look brutal, check whether PTO and training are accidentally counted as unutilized. Settings → Reports → Utilization → "Exclude PTO + training" should be on.