6 numbers every HVAC & plumbing shop should watch (Jobber + QuickBooks)

Most HVAC and plumbing owners don’t need more numbers. They need the right few, read the same way every week. Your field-service software (Jobber or Housecall Pro) and your accounting (QuickBooks) already hold every one of them. The trouble is they hold them in different places, in different shapes, and none of the six means much on its own.

So here are the six, each with a worked example. When I read a shop’s numbers, this is the order I read them in. To keep the arithmetic concrete I’ve run each one against Northside Comfort, our labeled sample shop (a fictional HVAC and plumbing business Guidepost reads for demonstrations). Every Northside figure below is sample data, not a real customer. For each number you get the read, the sample worked through, and the part most guides skip: when a move is worth acting on, and when it’s just noise.

1. Revenue trend

The read: total revenue from completed jobs, month over month. It lives in your completed jobs in Jobber or Housecall Pro, reconciled against QuickBooks. Exclude cancelled and not-yet-completed jobs, or you’ll fool yourself.

On the sample shop: Northside held near $22,000 a month for most of the year: roughly $13,000 HVAC and $9,000 plumbing. In May the total fell to about $14,000. Read alone, that’s an $8,000 hole and a bad night’s sleep. Read against the split, the whole drop is plumbing: it came in near $1,000 while HVAC stayed normal.

Move or noise: one slow month is noise. Three months of drift is a pattern. The May number looked like a shop-wide slump and wasn’t; the trend line, not the single month, is what you act on. Watch the direction over a quarter, and always break a scary total into its parts before you decide it means anything.

2. Average ticket

The read: revenue divided by the number of completed jobs. It separates “we did more jobs” from “we did bigger jobs,” which are two very different businesses. The raw material lives in job revenue in your FSM.

On the sample shop: Guidepost read Northside’s last ~230 completed jobs, roughly a quarter’s work, about 77 a month. Against a normal $22,000 month that’s an average ticket near $286 ($22,000 ÷ 77). Notice what the May revenue drop did not do: it barely moved the average ticket, because Northside didn’t start doing cheaper work, it did fewer plumbing jobs. Same ticket, fewer jobs. That’s the distinction the average is there to catch.

Move or noise: a wobble of a few dollars, month to month, is noise. A steady slide on one service line, say maintenance calls drifting down over a quarter, is worth acting on, and usually points at discounting, scope creep, or a pricing problem you can fix. Here’s how to find out why your average ticket is drifting.

3. Accounts receivable, and how overdue it is

The read: money customers owe you, grouped by how late it is (0–30, 31–60, 61–90, 90+ days). This is cash you’ve already earned and haven’t collected, and the older a balance gets, the harder it is to recover. It lives in your QuickBooks invoices (balance and due date).

On the sample shop: Northside is owed $11,700, and it’s aging. Three invoices carry almost all of it: Riverside Apartments at $6,200, Bella Vista Cafe at $3,400, and Greenpoint Dental at $2,100. Two commercial accounts hold $9,600 of the $11,700, about 82%. So this isn’t a hundred small chases. It’s two phone calls that clear most of the risk.

Move or noise: a balance sitting at 0–30 days is usually noise; that’s just how invoicing works. A balance crossing 60 days is worth acting on, and the action is boring and effective: a reminder early, then a phone call. A surprising amount of “we had a tight month” is really a few big invoices nobody chased. Here’s a simple system for staying on top of it.

4. Rework / callback rate

The read: the share of completed jobs flagged as a callback or redo. Rework is pure margin erosion, you pay twice to earn once, and it quietly costs you customer goodwill on top. It lives in your job records in the FSM, wherever callback or redo flags get set.

On the sample shop: Dwight Okafor has 3 callbacks this month. On its own that’s a number without a denominator. Against the roughly 20 jobs he ran, it’s about 15%, while the rest of the crew sits closer to one in twenty. That gap, not the raw count of three, is the signal.

Move or noise: one callback is noise; every trade has hard jobs that don’t take the first time. One tech running three times the crew’s rate, month after month, is worth acting on. Before you act, diagnose the pattern, not the person: sometimes your best tech gets handed the ugliest jobs and eats the callbacks that come with them. A ride-along tells you more than the number does. Here’s how callbacks eat your margin.

5. Revenue per technician

The read: completed-job revenue divided by the techs who ran the jobs. It shows you capacity and constraint: who’s carrying load, and where a single person is a single point of failure. It lives in your job-to-technician records in the FSM. One honest caveat: most systems credit only the primary tech on a job, so crews under-credit the helpers. Read it as a guide, not a scoreboard.

On the sample shop: Northside’s May tells the whole story. Plumbing revenue runs about $9,000 a month, and almost all of it rode on one person, Tina Alvarez, the plumbing lead. She was out most of May, and plumbing fell to roughly $1,000, an $8,000 swing traceable to one calendar. Revenue per tech would have flagged that concentration long before it cost the month.

Move or noise: a single soft month for one tech is noise, people take vacations and draw the hard jobs. A sustained gap, or a whole line of revenue resting on one person, is worth acting on, less as a performance question than a risk one: what happens to that $9,000 the next time that person is out. Because of the primary-tech crediting caveat, never use this number to rank helpers.

6. Marketing ROI (read two ways)

The read: booked revenue against ad spend, by channel. It’s the question every owner asks and few answer honestly, because the honest answer is that attribution on FSM data is partly guesswork. So read it two ways: an attributed view and a plain spend view, and watch cost per booked job as the trend. It lives in your jobs plus lead-source tags in the FSM, joined to ad spend from Google, Meta, and TikTok.

On the sample shop: last quarter Northside spent more on Meta than on Google, but Google brought back more booked work per dollar. Put rough sample numbers on it: Google spend of $1,200 tied to 8 booked jobs is $150 a job; Meta spend of $1,800 tied to 5 booked jobs is $360 a job. Meta’s return has cratered while Google held. See our deeper dive on reading HVAC marketing ROI.

Move or noise: a one-month swing in cost per booked job is noise; ad performance is lumpy. A full quarter of divergence like Northside’s is worth a look. But look is the right verb: never reallocate budget on the attributed number alone. Verify the lead source on those Meta jobs first, because a referral who happened to click a brand ad will lie to your report. The data points at the question. The decision stays yours.

The metrics were never the problem. Keeping up is.

Any one of these six is easy to pull once. The problem is doing it every week, across three systems, while you’re running the business. That’s the whole reason we built Guidepost: it watches these six numbers for you and sends a short, plain-English digest of what needs attention, every figure traced to its source.

These six are the common core, but the number that matters most shifts with the trade, so it depends on what you run, and you can turn them into a habit with the 15-minute weekly review. To see what the digest actually looks like, look at a sample digest.