Our booking rate is strong but revenue is flat. Where is it going?
Somewhere between the booking and the invoice. Check five places in order: bookings never scheduled inside the window the customer would accept, scheduled jobs that cancelled or no-showed, completed visits that produced only a diagnostic charge, estimates presented and left open, and completed jobs invoiced below what that job type normally carries. Each has a different owner and a different fix.
A booking is a promise with five ways to break
Booking rate measures the front door. It says nothing about whether the work happened or what it was worth. In a healthy operation the distance between booked and invoiced is small and stable. When revenue goes flat against a strong booking rate, that distance grew, and it grew in a specific place.
Work the five candidates in order, because the earlier ones are larger and cheaper to fix.
The five, in the order worth checking
- Booked but never scheduled acceptably. An urgent call scheduled a week and a half out is a cancellation with a delay. Measure days from booking to first offered slot, by job type.
- Scheduled but cancelled or no-showed. Requires forced reason codes to be diagnosable at all.
- Ran the call, sold only the diagnostic. The truck went, the customer paid a fee, and nothing else happened. This is the one people skip.
- Quoted and left open. The visit was paid for and the sale was never worked. See how pipeline aging changes what gets chased.
- Completed below the normal ticket for the job type. Often pricing, sometimes scope, occasionally a data problem in how the job was coded.
Size the leaks before fixing any of them
Each of these should be expressed as a count and as an expected revenue amount, using the average ticket of the relevant job type. Ranked that way, the priority is usually obvious and usually not what people expected. In many shops the diagnostic-only visit is larger than everything else combined and has never been reported.
Sizing also protects against fixing the smallest leak because it is the most visible or the easiest to argue about.
Why the diagnostic-only visit hides so well
It looks like success everywhere it appears. The lead converted, the job completed, an invoice exists, the customer paid. Only comparing it to the expected value of that job type reveals that a full dispatch slot produced almost nothing.
Finding it requires job-type-level ticket baselines and the discipline to compare every completed job against its own baseline rather than against a company average. That comparison, run automatically, is exactly the kind of thing operational AI is for, and it depends on clean integration with the system that holds the job records.
Topics: booking rate · revenue leakage · conversion · diagnostics · dispatch
Have a version of this question about your own business?
The useful answer usually depends on which systems you run and how they're connected. That's a conversation, not a blog post.