How much is “waiting on parts” costing you?
Every service business has jobs stuck in the same place: the diagnosis is done, the part is ordered, and the repair is waiting on a box. Some of those jobs never come back. Put your numbers in and see what that adds up to.
Calls that end with something on order, not your total call volume.
Parts and labor billed on the second trip.
Shipping time does not count. This is the box sitting in your shop.
Customer replaced the unit, called somebody else, or stopped answering.
Walking out the door every year
$14,227
That is 50 repairs you already diagnosed and ordered parts for, out of 624 parts jobs a year.
$1,954
finished work sitting unbilled at any given moment
83 hrs
a year on “any word on my part?” calls
4 days
added to every repair after the part is already here
Book the return visit the day the box lands and the 4 days go to zero, along with the $1,954 sitting unbilled. The tracking numbers are already in your job notes — somebody just has to be watching them.
Put SqueezyDo on it — free for 14 daysNothing is sent anywhere. The math runs in your browser.
Where these numbers come from
No industry averages and no survey you cannot check. Four inputs, two arithmetic steps, and the assumptions written out so you can argue with them:
- Jobs that end with a part being ordered
- Not every call needs a part, so this is only the slice that does — the ones where the tech writes up a diagnosis, orders something, and drives away without finishing the repair.
- Average return-visit ticket
- What the second visit bills: parts plus labor. If your first visit carries a diagnostic fee you have already collected, leave it out.
- Days between the part landing and the visit being booked
- This is the gap the calculator is really about. It does not count shipping or back order time, which nobody controls. It counts the days after the box is already in your shop.
- Parts jobs that are never finished
- Jobs that quietly stop: the customer bought a new unit, went with somebody faster, or stopped answering. Most shops guess low here until they go through last year's open jobs and count.
- Status calls
- Two calls per parts job at four minutes each — the customer asking where their part is, and somebody calling the supplier to find out. That is the office time the last number is built from.
Why parts jobs go cold
Ask any owner what the hard part of growing was and parts ordering comes up before hiring does. Not the ordering itself — the keeping track of it. Four ways it goes wrong, all of them ordinary:
The tracking number lives in the job notes and nowhere else
A warranty board ships from the manufacturer, a motor comes from the supply house, and the odd item gets bought online. One job, three carriers, three tracking pages — and half of the supplier portals hand you a link that has stopped working by the time you click it. Checking all of that is somebody’s job until it is nobody’s job.
The part arrived and sat
The box gets signed for on Tuesday and gets noticed on Thursday. Nothing went wrong, exactly — the delivery just did not tell anyone. Meanwhile the tech who diagnosed the unit has moved on to eleven other calls and the customer is still without a working appliance.
The customer stopped waiting
Homeowner forums are full of repairs that ran past thirty days with nobody calling to explain why. Some of those people bought a new unit. Some called a competitor who answered the phone. Either way the diagnosis was done, the part was ordered, and the money went somewhere else.
Six weeks later, it was the wrong part
Techs describe waiting out a long factory order, opening the box at the counter, and finding something that does not fit the model in front of them. You cannot prevent that one. You can find out on the day it lands instead of the day you finally drive back out.
What actually closes the gap
You cannot make a back-ordered compressor ship faster. You can make sure the day it arrives is the day the repair gets scheduled. That takes four things:
- 1
Put every tracking number in one place
One list per job, whoever ordered it and whichever supplier it came from. If it has a tracking number, it belongs there.
- 2
Let the carrier report in
Nobody should be opening tabs to check UPS, FedEx and a freight portal by hand. The status should arrive on its own.
- 3
Tell the tech who owns the job
Not a shared inbox and not a group chat with forty messages a day. The person who diagnosed the unit gets told the part is here.
- 4
Book the return visit that day
This is the whole point. Every day between the box landing and the visit going on the calendar is a day you chose, not a day the supplier gave you.
That is the whole of what SqueezyDo does. It reads the tracking numbers out of your job notes, follows the shipment across 1,200+ carriers, and messages the assigned tech the moment the part is delivered. It is not another place to run your business from — your scheduling stays where it is.
Start a free 14-day trialQuestions owners ask about this
- How do I find out how many of my jobs are waiting on a part?
- Open last month in whatever you dispatch with and count the jobs that ended in a part being ordered. Most owners are surprised — in a shop running two or three techs it is usually somewhere between eight and twenty a week.
- The part is on back order for six weeks. No software fixes that, does it?
- No, and this calculator does not pretend otherwise. Back order time and shipping time are the supplier's problem. The days it counts are the ones after the part is already at your shop and nobody has booked the return visit yet. Those days are yours.
- Our parts come from three different places. Does that change the math?
- It usually makes it worse. Warranty parts come from the manufacturer, stock items come from the supply house, and the odd one gets bought online, so a single job can involve three carriers and three tracking pages. That is why the part sitting in the shop for two days is so common — nobody was watching that particular box.
- What counts as a lost job here?
- A job where the part was ordered and the repair never happened. The customer replaced the appliance, called a competitor, or simply stopped picking up. The revenue was already earned on paper — the diagnosis was done and the part was on the way — and then it went away.
- Does my field service software not already do this?
- Housecall Pro, Jobber and ServiceTitan schedule the visit and invoice it, and they will hold a note with a tracking number in it. What they do not do is watch the carrier and tell you the day the box arrives. The tracking number sits in the job notes and somebody has to remember to go look.
- We run three techs. Is this worth measuring at a shop our size?
- Smaller shops feel it more, not less. There is no parts coordinator, so checking tracking numbers lands on whoever is answering the phone, and it is the first thing dropped on a busy day. The math above scales down — put your own numbers in.