← Business Guides · Explore this topic
Estimate how shorter travel time changes the number of jobs a small HVAC team can complete, then cap the result by demand and subtract operating costs.
Use your figures: Open the calculator. All amounts in the examples are illustrative and can be read in one currency of your choice.
Start with productive minutes, not the full shift
An eight-hour shift does not necessarily contain eight hours available for jobs and travel. Remove breaks, fixed administration, vehicle checks and a realistic buffer before entering productive minutes. Keep the same definition for the current schedule and the proposed one.
Use average service time from a comparable mix of jobs. A maintenance visit and a complex repair should not be treated as interchangeable when one dominates the schedule. The model is a capacity estimate; it does not select routes, assign technicians or check qualifications.
Calculate whole jobs for each truck
Jobs per truck per day = the whole-number floor of productive minutes ÷ (service minutes per job + travel minutes per job). Multiply by truck count for team capacity. Complete jobs matter: four and a half theoretical slots cannot automatically become five finished visits.
Use travel per completed job consistently. Include the first or last journey if those journeys consume the productive minutes you entered. Count parking and access time somewhere in the service or travel estimate, once.
Why ten minutes can create an extra slot
With five trucks and 420 productive minutes each, a 60-minute service plus 50-minute travel time allows floor(420 ÷ 110) = three jobs per truck: 15 jobs a day.
Reducing travel to 40 minutes gives floor(420 ÷ 100) = four jobs per truck: 20 jobs a day. With demand for 20 jobs, the estimated gain is five daily jobs. At money left after variable costs of 120 per extra job and 22 workdays, the additional money left after variable costs is 13,200. Subtract 300 in monthly process costs for a estimated monthly net benefit of 12,900.
Demand can remove most of the headline gain
If there is demand for only 16 jobs a day, the same schedule improvement adds one completed job rather than five. The money left after variable costs becomes 2,640, and net benefit after the same 300 cost is 2,340. If demand is at or below the current 15-job capacity, extra slots create no estimated additional-job benefit.
Time can still be useful for shorter days or resilience, but do not count that as sold work. money left after variable costs per additional job should reflect extra parts, labor or other variable costs. Revenue per job is not the same as money left after variable costs.
Validate the schedule before relying on the estimate
Try the proposed approach on a representative day. Check appointment windows, technician skills, parts availability, emergency calls and job overruns. A favorable average can hide a schedule that fails at the busiest hour. Test a slower-service scenario as well as a lower-demand scenario.
After improving capacity, check that the additional completed work reaches an invoice with the billing reconciliation calculator. Browse field operations tools for the associated operating questions.
Related reading
Work through your own numbers
Use the hvac dispatch capacity calculator to test a baseline and a cautious improvement. Check the calculation guide if you need help with currencies, sharing or assumptions.
Prepared by ProWorkstack. Examples are constructed calculations, not customer results. See our editorial standards.