The Profit & Pricing Command Center

The rate on your sign is not the rate you collect

Somewhere between the posted rate and the deposit sit the discounts, the comebacks, the hours nobody billed, the flat-rate jobs that ran long, and the courtesy check that turned into forty minutes. The gap is real money. Most owners have never put a number on it.

How it works

You open one tab and enter about a dozen numbers off last month's invoices. Labor dollars, hours, technician pay, that kind of thing. Everything else in the workbook calculates from there. Eight tabs, no setup project, no accountant, no data import.

EFFECTIVE LABOR RATE

The rate you post against the rate you actually collect. The gap per hour and the gap per year. Then the five leaks that make up that gap, sized, so you know which one to go after first.

For reference: the Tekmetric state survey puts the US average posted labor rate at $132 per hour in 2026, while MySyara's 2026 benchmarks put the average independent shop's effective labor rate at $115.48. That is the industry spread. Yours will be its own number.

BREAK-EVEN

The true loaded cost of one technician hour, wages plus everything that hour has to carry. The rate below which you are working for free. And the break-even car count, which is the number you should know before you set any price.

RATE SIMULATOR

Six rate increases side by side, with the extra revenue for each. And the number most rate calculators leave out: how many billed hours you could afford to lose at that price and still be ahead. That answers the question you are actually asking, which is whether raising the rate will cost you more than it brings in.

PARTS MATRIX

Markup by cost bracket, with a box where you type a part cost and get the price to charge. Shops without a matrix typically run 20 to 30 percent parts margin against a 50 to 55 percent target. The matrix is the difference between pricing a $4 part and a $400 part the same way.

JOB PROFITABILITY and TECH PRODUCTIVITY

The 20 most common jobs with a verdict on each, so you can see which ones carry the shop and which ones you are doing as a favor. Then hours paid against hours sold, per technician, which is the conversation you have been meaning to have.

The terms

One Excel workbook, 8 tabs. One-time payment of $28.90. Instant download. Works in Excel and Google Sheets, offline. No subscription. This tells you what your numbers are. What you do about them is yours.