You cannot steer what you do not measure
A workshop can feel busy and drift downhill at the same time. Cash-in-hand tells you about today; it says nothing about whether the business is getting healthier or quietly sliding. These eight numbers do. None of them need an accountant — they fall out of your job cards, if your job cards are somewhere you can read them.
The eight to watch
- Average bill valueWhat a typical job is worth. If it is flat while costs rise, your prices or your upsell are slipping — and you would not feel it day to day.
- Cars in per dayYour top line in one number. Read alongside average bill value, it tells you whether growth is more cars or bigger jobs.
- Bay utilisationHow much of your capacity actually earns. Empty bays are rent you pay for nothing; this is the number that exposes them.
- Technician productivityBillable work per technician. It separates the busy from the productive, and tells you when you genuinely need another pair of hands.
- Repeat customer rateThe share of work from cars you have seen before. The cheapest growth there is — and the clearest sign of whether customers trust you.
- Average time in workshopHow long a car sits from intake to delivery. Long stays clog bays and annoy customers; watch this and the bottleneck shows itself.
- Parts marginWhat you make on parts after cost. Thin or negative here means parts are leaking — from dead stock or from fitting without billing.
- Pending paymentsMoney owed but not collected. A busy workshop can still run dry if this number is quietly climbing.
Where Kenro fits
These numbers are already inside your job cards — the problem with a paper register is that you can never add them up. Kenro Workshop keeps the jobs, parts, payments and stages in one place, so the eight numbers above are there to read instead of guess.