Distance is not the economic question. When an owner asks whether a far-off account is worth serving, the instinct is to pull up a map and a mileage figure, but geography on its own tells you almost nothing about whether the work pays. What matters is how much of your company’s resources an account or route consumes to serve, measured against the contribution that work generates. A distant property can be economically strong, and a close one can quietly drain crew capacity. You cannot tell which is which until you separate the contribution the work produces from the burden the route structure imposes to produce it.
This Resource makes that separation visible. It measures the economics of individual accounts and of the routes they sit on, and it surfaces the management questions those numbers raise. It does not tell you to drop an account, raise a price, redraw a route, resequence stops, pick a territory, or open or close a branch. Those calls depend on your service commitments, your capacity, your market, and judgment the numbers alone cannot supply. What the model gives you is a company-specific read on where paid crew time is going and what each account and route contributes once travel and mobilization are counted honestly. It assumes a reader who owns or leads recurring field-service work, including maintenance, lawn care, irrigation service, or snow routes, with crews, trucks, and overhead already in place.
What route burden actually is
Confusion around route economics comes from collapsing several distinct things into one number called “cost per account.” The pieces behave differently and answer different questions, so keep them separate.
Begin with time on the property. Productive on-site service time is the time a crew spends performing the work you bill for. It is distinct from travel or windshield time, the time spent driving between the shop and the stop and between stops, and from mobilization and setup time, the time spent unloading, staging equipment, walking the property, and loading back up. All three consume paid crew hours, but this model classifies only the first as productive on-site service.
Each block of time carries a labor cost, and those costs should stay labeled by what they pay for: the crew labor cost of productive work, and the crew labor cost of travel and mobilization. Vehicle and travel cost belongs in its own line wherever you measure it, covering fuel, wear, and any reimbursement your company incurs. Then there is directly traceable account or service cost, meaning materials, disposal, subcontracted work, or other costs you can tie to a specific account without guessing.
Once those inputs are defined, two contribution figures follow. Account contribution before route burden is the account’s revenue less its directly traceable service cost and the labor cost of the productive on-site work. It shows what the account looks like at the property level, before you count the cost of getting a crew there and setting up. Route-related economic burden is the travel and mobilization labor plus the measurable vehicle and travel cost attached to serving the work. Subtract that burden and you have contribution after measurable route burden, what the account or route contributes once the cost of reaching and staging the work is included.
Two cautions matter here. Contribution after measurable route burden is not net profit. It is an intermediate figure that sits above business-wide overhead. Overhead recovery, the question of how your fixed and indirect costs get absorbed across the business, is a separate concept handled by a separate resource, and this model deliberately does not spread overhead across accounts. Blending overhead in here would defeat the purpose, since the point is to isolate route burden rather than bury it in a general allocation.
That caution is worth stating as a mechanism. When drive time is treated as generic overhead and spread across all work by a flat percentage, the accounting understates the accounts that consume the most travel and overstates the tight, dense ones. A flat percentage assigns the same relative burden to a nearby stop and a far one, even though the far stop consumes far more crew capacity in windshield time. That is a structural feature of percentage allocation, not a claim about how often it happens in any particular company. It is the reason route burden is measured directly here rather than allocated as a share of overhead.
One boundary remains. Price, markup, margin, and required profit are not costs, and this Resource stops at contribution. It does not compute what you should charge. Pricing decisions draw on this analysis but live elsewhere.
Time units: clock hours versus crew labor-hours
One error in route math quietly distorts every figure that follows: mixing two different units of time. Clock time is the elapsed time on the clock. Crew labor-hours are clock time multiplied by the number of people being paid during it. The two are not interchangeable, and treating them as if they were throws off everything downstream.
Take a purely illustrative case, offered only to show the arithmetic and not as a benchmark or default value. A three-person crew drives thirty minutes to a stop. That is half an hour of route clock time, but because three people are being paid for that half hour, it is 1.5 crew labor-hours of travel. The labor cost of that drive depends on the labor-hour figure, not the clock figure.
The conversion rule itself is simple. Travel labor-hours equal travel clock hours multiplied by crew size, and productive labor-hours equal productive clock hours multiplied by crew size. It runs in one direction only: use it when your time is recorded as clock time and you need labor-hours. If a value is already entered as labor-hours, it has accounted for crew size, and multiplying by crew size again double-counts the labor. Before you run any numbers, decide which basis you are working in and state it, because the two bases produce very different totals and the gap is easy to miss.
Two levels of analysis: account and route
Account economics and route economics answer different questions, and they should never be merged into a single unlabeled profitability figure. Keeping them distinct lets you see both which individual accounts are strong and whether the route as a whole converts paid crew time into billable work.
The account-level view examines one recurring account and includes, with productive labor modeled separately from other directly traceable service costs:
- account revenue for the period;
- directly traceable service cost;
- productive on-site labor cost;
- account contribution before route burden;
- measurable account-specific travel and mobilization labor;
- measurable account-specific vehicle and travel cost;
- contribution after measurable route burden.
The route-level snapshot examines a defined route, day, crew, or territory as a unit and includes:
- total route revenue for the period;
- productive versus travel and mobilization clock hours;
- productive versus travel and mobilization paid crew labor-hours;
- the productive and travel shares of paid time;
- contribution before and after route burden for the route;
- route contribution per paid crew labor-hour.
Route contribution per paid crew labor-hour can be useful when the numerator and denominator share the same scope and period and the paid-hours input covers the full route snapshot. If revenue and contribution are measured for a route over a month, the paid crew labor-hours in the denominator have to cover that same route and that same month. Any time you build a per-hour or per-dollar figure, confirm both halves describe the same thing over the same window. Mismatched periods or scopes produce a number that looks precise and means nothing.
Travel and mobilization: whose time is it?
On a multi-stop route, some travel is shared across accounts. That shared travel is not automatically caused by any one account, and this is where allocation logic can go wrong. If a crew passes four properties on the way to a fifth, the drive is not fairly charged to the fifth account alone, and it is not cleanly divisible among the five without a modeling choice.
For account-level analysis, the cleaner input is measurable account-specific travel: the incremental or detour travel that exists because that account is on the route. Incremental travel is traceable in a way that a share of shared route travel is not. Allocating shared route burden across accounts is possible and sometimes useful, but it is a modeling choice, and it should be labeled as modeled or allocated. It should never be presented as directly traceable cost, because it is not.
The distinction changes how you read the results. Removing an account does not automatically eliminate the shared route travel around it. If the crew still drives the corridor to reach other work, most of that travel remains, and only the avoidable, incremental portion disappears. The same logic runs in reverse when you add work: a new account that fills a gap on an existing route is served at incremental cost, not at the route’s average cost per stop. Reason as though every account carries an average share of shared travel and you will be misled in both directions, understating what stays when you remove work and overstating what you add when you fill a gap.
Miles versus time, and the cost basis that goes with each
When paid crew capacity is the operating constraint, time is the more direct measure of what a route consumes. An hour of windshield time is an hour the crew cannot spend on productive on-site work, regardless of how many miles it covers. Miles still matter, but chiefly as a driver of vehicle cost: fuel, wear, and any mileage reimbursement the company pays.
When miles enter the model as cost, they enter at a vehicle cost the company supplies. There is no universal mileage rate here. The Resource does not prefill an IRS rate or a generic industry figure for cost per mile, because neither reflects what a particular fleet costs to run. A rate built for a tax deduction or a national average is not an economic measurement of your trucks. If you want vehicle cost in the analysis, it comes from your own numbers.
Labor cost follows the same principle. The productive labor cost draws on your company’s own productive labor-hour cost basis, the figure that a fully loaded productive field hour actually costs, developed in the resource devoted to that question. Travel time can carry its own labor rate if your company treats travel pay differently from production pay, and the model allows a separate company-entered travel-time rate for that reason. It does not assume travel is unpaid, and it does not assume a single universal wage or burden rate across every crew and role. The rates are yours to enter because only your rates describe your economics.
Outlying versus nearby accounts
Once route burden is measured directly, the reflexive verdict that distant accounts are bad and nearby ones are good stops holding up. A distant account can be economically attractive for reasons that have nothing to do with mileage: strong contribution dollars, high revenue, low service complexity, proximity to other work you already serve, or a seasonal or strategic fit that makes the route viable. A far account that anchors a cluster of other stops can carry the corridor rather than drain it.
A nearby account can be weak for reasons that have nothing to do with distance. Heavy productive labor, long setup and mobilization, frequent rework, tight access, or disproportionate administrative and billing effort can erode contribution on a property minutes from the shop. Proximity is not contribution. The analysis exists to surface each account’s measurable economics so you can see the actual pattern, not to convert distance into a grade.
The incremental-account test
For a single account, a useful narrow question is: what does this account contribute after its measurable incremental route burden? The inputs are the account’s revenue, its directly traceable service cost, its productive on-site labor, and the incremental travel and mobilization the account adds to the route, converted to labor-hours and costed at your rates, plus any measurable account-specific vehicle cost. The output is the account’s contribution after that incremental burden.
Read carefully what this does and does not tell you. It tells you what the account contributes on the terms you can measure. It does not tell you to keep it or drop it. A low or negative figure is a reason to investigate, not a verdict, because the decision depends on capacity, service commitments, the account’s role in a cluster, and factors the number does not capture.
Reading the results: known, estimated, and missing
The quality of the answer depends on the quality of the inputs, so the model tracks how solid each input is and treats blanks, zeros, and estimates differently.
A blank field is not zero. If you have not entered a travel time, the model does not assume travel is free; it treats the input as missing. A typed zero, by contrast, is a valid entry wherever zero is economically possible, such as an account with no traceable materials cost. The difference between an empty field and a deliberate zero is real information, and the model preserves it rather than collapsing both to nothing.
An estimated input is usable but should carry a visible note, so anyone reading the output knows which figures rest on judgment rather than record. A missing input suppresses only the outputs that depend on it rather than blanking the whole analysis; the figures that do not need the missing value still stand. Those distinctions produce three honest readiness states. A snapshot is provisional when it runs on estimates you have flagged, incomplete when required inputs are still missing and dependent outputs are suppressed, and ready when the inputs that matter are entered and known. The model does not reduce this to a confidence percentage or a red, yellow, and green score, because a single grade would hide exactly the input-by-input judgment that tells you how far to trust each figure.
Applying it to your company
To use the model well, define the snapshot deliberately. Decide whether you are examining a single account, a route, a crew, a day, or a territory, and fix the period so revenue, cost, and hours all describe the same window. Then gather the company inputs the analysis needs: your productive labor-hour cost basis, any separate travel-time rate you use, your own vehicle cost if you are including miles, account revenue and directly traceable non-labor service costs, the productive, travel, and mobilization time recorded in whatever unit you have chosen, and total paid crew labor-hours for the route snapshot if you want paid-time percentages and per-paid-hour metrics.
The findings are meant to frame management questions, not to answer them. A route with a low productive share of paid time raises a consolidation or rescheduling question. An account that is strong before route burden and weak after it raises a repricing or rescoping question. A cluster of thin accounts in one corridor raises a route-structure question, and a single weak account raises an account-review question. In each case the model hands you the measured economics and the question; the decision stays with you.
If you work through the snapshot and find that important route costs are estimated, missing, or genuinely hard to trace, that is a reasonable point to bring in help. Profit in Bloom can work with your own numbers to map where the gaps are and evaluate accounts and routes using the actual economics of your business rather than generic rules. If that would be useful, request a consultation. The goal is the same either way: to see clearly what your accounts and routes contribute once travel and mobilization are counted, and to ask better questions because of it.