How to Track Labor Hours and Parts on Repair Job
Most repair shops are good at counting parts. They know how many screens, batteries, and charging ports are on the shelf. But far fewer shops track the other big cost of a repair: the time a technician spends on the job. If you only track parts, you only see half the picture. You might finish a repair, charge the customer, and still not know if that job actually made money.
This guide shows you how to track both labor time and parts on a single repair, so you can see what each job really costs. If you already record parts well, this is the missing half.
Why Most Shops Track Parts but Forget Labor
Parts are physical. You can see them, count them, and notice when they run low. Time is invisible. A technician might spend ten minutes on one repair and two hours on another, but unless you write that time down somewhere, it disappears. At the end of the week, you know which parts you used, but you have no idea which jobs ate up your team’s hours. Those are often the jobs quietly losing you money.
Shift Time vs Job Time
This is where many shops get it wrong. Repair shops have two kinds of time, and each answers a different question.
- Shift time is when a technician clocks in and out for the day. It tells you how many hours they worked in total.
- Job time is how long they spent on one specific repair. It tells you how much that single job cost in labor.
A technician can be clocked in for eight hours, but that does not tell you how those hours were split across ten different repairs. To price jobs correctly, you need job time, not just shift time. In Fixitize, technicians can clock in and out for their shifts, and a separate work order timer lets them track the time spent on each individual job.
How to Log Time Against One Job
The idea is simple: when a technician starts working on a repair, they start the timer for that job. When they stop, the system saves the time against that job. Even if the repair has several line items, such as a screen replacement plus a battery swap on the same device, the work order timer records the total time for that one job in one place.
This keeps time tied to the actual repair, not to a rough guess at the end of the day. Guessing is where money leaks out, because busy shops always guess low.
Bringing Parts and Labor Onto One Job
Once you’re tracking time, the next step is to bring parts and time together on the same repair. The parts side works the same way it always has: each part used gets added to the job. If you want a deeper look at just the parts side, we cover it fully in how to track parts used on a repair job.
The point here is that both live on the same work order. The parts you fitted and the time you spent sit side by side on one repair record. That is what turns a job from “we fixed it” into “here is exactly what it cost us to fix it.”
Seeing What a Job Really Costs
Here is where it becomes useful for the shop owner. When you record both parts and time, you can compare what a job cost you with what you charged.
In Fixitize, this shows up in two places. On the work order itself, the business owner can see the estimated profit for that job, based on the pricing and costs. Technicians do not see this, so your margins stay private. For the full picture across many jobs, reporting combines parts and labor. That is where you can spot which types of repairs are worth your time and which ones only look busy.
Why This Helps You Price Repairs
When you know the true cost of a repair, i.e. parts plus labor, you can price with confidence instead of guessing. You might find a common repair is priced too low once you count the time it really takes. Or you might find a job you thought was small is actually one of your best earners. Either way, you are deciding with real numbers.
Tracking time alongside parts is the step that moves a shop from ‘we stay busy’ to ‘we know what pays.’ In Fixitize, the job timer and the parts used sit on the same work order, so you have the true cost of every repair when you need it.