Manager Forum

I've been using ShopKey for at least 20 years. Since our shop also has a towing company, which entails loaded mileage charges at times, I have always had a labor rate set up for the mileage charges. In other words, $4.50 per mile, change the labor rate to that, then enter the number of miles as hours. That helps eliminate clerical errors when it comes to entering the items on the repair order.

We have been recently bought out by a local company and they are having trouble with this method. Because some of our tows are long distance, they can have several miles attached to the tow. When we have that, it is skewing the number of labor hours and they keep asking why we had so many labor hours on that particular day. The only other way I can think of managing this is to use a non-inventory part, but that would also skew the profit margins because that part would not have a cost associated with it.

Any ideas on how to handle this so it doesn't skew the labor hours?

We have our towing set up as a sublet instead of labor line.
So it's pretty much set up to say (Towed from {location} to {shop/where it was dropped off})
And then we tally what the trip to and back would be for the pricing, so that way it did not mess with our labor hours.
We also have this set up incase we need to sublet a towing for what ever reason.

I am curious if someone else has a better way for this.

Prestige1 wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 12, 2025 7:50 am

We have our towing set up as a sublet instead of labor line.
So it's pretty much set up to say (Towed from {location} to {shop/where it was dropped off})
And then we tally what the trip to and back would be for the pricing, so that way it did not mess with our labor hours.
We also have this set up incase we need to sublet a towing for what ever reason.

I am curious if someone else has a better way for this.

Thanks for the suggestion. I am going to give this some thought and see what I can come up with.

Prestige1 wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 12, 2025 7:50 am

We have our towing set up as a sublet instead of labor line.
So it's pretty much set up to say (Towed from {location} to {shop/where it was dropped off})
And then we tally what the trip to and back would be for the pricing, so that way it did not mess with our labor hours.
We also have this set up incase we need to sublet a towing for what ever reason.

I am curious if someone else has a better way for this.

We use sublet as well for towing with "Towing" as a category as well as a labor revenue.

This is what I have decided to manage this. I will used a canned job with the mileage and dollars total entered manually.