Which KPIs should a home service business actually track?

The five that connect to each other

The reason to start here is not that these are the only important numbers. It is that they multiply into each other, so a change in one explains a change in another. Leads times booking rate gives booked jobs; booked jobs times average ticket gives revenue; spend divided by booked jobs gives your acquisition cost against the thing that actually produces money.

That chain means you can always decompose a revenue miss into the step where it happened. A pile of unrelated metrics cannot do that, no matter how many of them there are.

Cost per booked job, not cost per lead

This is the single most valuable swap most companies can make. Cost per lead is a marketing metric; cost per booked job is a business metric, and the gap between them is the call center. Two sources with identical cost per lead can differ enormously once booking rate is applied, and the cheaper source is frequently the worse one.

Computing it requires joining ad spend to operational outcomes, which is the whole point of revenue intelligence and why the number rarely exists inside the ad platform alone.

What to add second

Once the spine is stable, the next tier is about capacity and pipeline rather than demand.

• Capacity fill for the next several days. Leading, and the earliest place a demand problem shows up.
• Unsold estimate value by age. Money already earned attention that is decaying.
• Revenue per tech day. Normalizes for headcount so growth and productivity are separable.
• Bookable-call rate. Separates "the phone isn't ringing" from "the wrong calls are ringing."

The pruning rule

For every metric on the list, name the person who owns it and the lever they would pull. If either is missing, the metric is reference material, not a KPI, and it belongs in a drill-down rather than on the main view.

This is also how you keep role-level reporting honest — the same underlying data, filtered to what each role can actually influence. See how this maps to home services operations.

Build them in the order the data allows

These metrics are not equally easy to produce, and pretending otherwise stalls projects. Revenue, booked jobs and average ticket usually come straight out of the field service system. Booking rate needs call outcomes, which means something has to judge whether each call was bookable.

Cost per booked job is last, because it requires joining ad spend to operational outcomes across systems that share no identifier. Sequence the build that way — reliable basics first, then the joined metrics — so people are using something real while the harder integration work proceeds.