13 April 2026 · Helen Marsh
Sold hours are not the same as clocked hours
Aftersales meetings collapse when the labour report and the clocking file describe different days. Here is how we keep them apart in a board pack.
Sold hours live on the repair order. Clocked hours live on the technician’s clock. Aftersales meetings treat them as cousins. They are not. A sold hour is what the advisor promised the customer, the manufacturer, or the internal account. A clocked hour is where a person stood, or at least where their fob said they stood.
When we write an aftersales board pack, those two columns sit on the same page with a gap line. If Friday’s sold hours exceed the clocks, we do not average them. We ask whether cards were pre-sold, whether a campaign was booked at a flat time the technician overran, or whether someone closed yesterday’s work this morning.
Independent garages feel this as cash in the till versus a day that felt endless. Franchise sites feel it when the manufacturer bonus uses one definition and the labour budget uses another. The pack cannot repair a bonus scheme. It can stop the dealer principal being handed a single “utilisation” figure that was built by dividing unlike things.
Before you send an extract, check that clocking codes for waiting on parts, waiting on authority, and cleaning the courtesy car are not lumped into productive. If they are, say so. We would rather print a contaminated month with a footnote than invent a cleaner ratio.