What is sold hours: the labour hours a workshop bills for, at the book or menu time for each job, regardless of how long the technician actually took.
Sold hours are the labour hours a workshop invoices. Every job on a repair order carries a time, taken from the manufacturer's book, a menu price or an advisor's quote, and the sum of those times across the period is the hours sold.
The phrase is standard in UK, Irish and North American dealerships alike. Some DMS reports call them billed hours, flagged hours or flat rate hours, and the last of those doubles as the name of the pay scheme built on them, covered under flat rate. In all cases the number describes what was charged, not what was worked.
Sold hours vs clocked hours vs attended hours
A workshop tracks three kinds of hours for every technician, and sold hours are the only one of the three that come from the invoice rather than the clock.
- Attended hours: the hours the technician was on site and paid.
- Clocked or productive hours: the hours the technician was actually on a job.
- Sold hours: the hours charged for those jobs.
A brake job booked at 1.5 hours that the technician finishes in 1.1 clocked hours still sells 1.5. The 0.4 hour difference is the technician's gain, and across a month that gap is what technician efficiency measures. A healthy workshop sells more hours than it clocks, and a very good one sells more hours than it attends.
Where sold hours come from
- Customer pay work, priced from the labour rate and the book time or a menu. Fully under the workshop's control, and the category where the effective rate is highest. See customer pay.
- Warranty work, where the manufacturer sets both the time allowed and the rate paid. The hours are sold to the manufacturer, and a claim that is rejected or reduced takes sold hours back off the month.
- Internal work, mostly used vehicle preparation and PDIs, sold to the sales department at an internal rate.
The mix matters because sold hours feed effective labour rate, and a month heavy on warranty and internal hours pulls that rate down even when the count of hours looks strong.
Sold hours example: one repair order
A customer brings a five year old diesel hatchback in for a service. The advisor books a menu service at 1.2 hours. The technician's vehicle health check finds a split rear anti-roll bar link and two tyres at 2.5 mm. The advisor quotes the link at 0.6 hours from the book and the tyres at 0.5 hours fitting time, and the customer approves the link but defers the tyres to next month.
Sold hours on that order are 1.2 + 0.6 = 1.8. The tyre time stays as identified work, recorded but unsold. The technician clocked 1.5 hours on the two jobs together, so the order ran at 120 percent efficiency. Across 300 orders a month, that pattern of one small additional job approved on roughly a third of visits is what moves hours per repair order from 1.2 to somewhere near 1.5.
What sold hours do not tell you
- They are not revenue. Hours sold at three different rates are not worth the same. Two workshops with identical sold hours can have labour sales twenty percent apart.
- They are not time worked. A technician at 130 percent efficiency and a technician who is being overbooked look the same in a sold hours report.
- They say nothing about quality. A comeback done free of charge sells zero hours and consumes clocked time, so the loss shows up in efficiency, not in the sold hours line.
- They are not demand. Hours identified and declined are the gap between what the workshop could have sold and what it did, and they sit in a different report.
Mistakes teams make with sold hours
The first is counting hours quoted as hours sold. Some DMS setups post labour lines when the estimate is written, and an unapproved line inflates the month until it is deleted. Sold hours should be counted from invoiced orders only. The second is leaving diagnostic time off the order because the customer went ahead with the repair, which sells the repair hours and gives away the diagnosis. The third is pushing technicians to lift sold hours directly. A technician does not sell hours; the advisor sells them and the technician earns them, and pressure on the wrong person ends in padded times and warranty audits.
The number is owned by the service manager, is pulled from closed repair orders in the DMS, and is normally reviewed daily per advisor and monthly per technician, split by customer pay, warranty and internal. Any target for the department should be set in customer pay hours specifically, because that is the category the front desk can move.
The lever for that category is the approval rate on identified work. A short video of the defect from the technician's phone, sent to the customer as a branded page with approve, book and pay buttons, is how workshops using Venta Video turn a quoted hour into a sold one while the car is still in the bay.
