Glossary.

Agreement renewal rate is the percentage of expiring service or maintenance agreements that renew, out of all agreements with a term ending in the period — the clearest measure of whether the recurring book is growing, holding, or leaking.

Callback rate is the percentage of completed jobs that require a return visit for the same reported issue within a defined follow-up window, typically 30 to 90 days.

Days sales outstanding (DSO) is the average number of days it takes to collect payment on invoiced revenue, calculated from outstanding receivables against billed revenue — the standard measure of how fast the book converts invoices into cash.

Dispatch efficiency measures how well a dispatcher matches available technicians to open work orders — accounting for skill match, drive time, and schedule gaps — to minimize idle and windshield time while still hitting arrival windows.

Field service KPIs are the specific key performance indicators a field service operation actively manages against — responsiveness, productivity, quality, and maintenance compliance measures — chosen from the wider set of field service metrics to drive scheduling, dispatch, and staffing decisions.

Field service metrics are the set of key performance indicators — responsiveness, productivity, quality, and maintenance compliance measures — that field service operations track from work order, agreement, and equipment data to run scheduling, dispatch, and staffing decisions.

First call resolution rate (also called first-visit resolution) is the percentage of service jobs a technician resolves completely on the initial visit, with no return trip required for the same reported issue.

First-time fix rate is the percentage of service jobs a technician completes correctly on the first visit, with no return trip for the same reported issue within a defined follow-up window — the inverse view of callback rate.

Gross margin per job is the profit on a single job after its direct cost — the labor, parts, and subcontractor cost attributed to that job — expressed in dollars or as a percentage of job revenue.

Labor utilization is the share of total paid labor hours billed to customer work over a period — the company- or branch-level view of how much of the workforce's paid time produces billable output.

Maintenance contract margin is the profit left on a service or maintenance agreement after the labor, parts, and subcontractor cost of serving it — measured over the agreement's term, because the price is set up front while the cost of serving accumulates all year.

Mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) is the average time between a work order or service request being created and dispatch or a technician formally acknowledging it, measured before travel or work begins.

Mean time to failure (MTTF) is the average amount of time a piece of equipment runs before it fails, calculated by dividing total operating hours across a fleet or asset class by the number of failures recorded in that period.

Mean time to repair (MTTR) is the average time it takes to return failed equipment to service once a repair is underway, calculated by dividing total repair downtime by the number of repairs completed in a period.

On-time arrival rate is the percentage of scheduled visits where the technician arrives within the promised arrival window, calculated against all scheduled visits in a period — the customer-facing measure of whether the shop turns up when it said it would.

Planned maintenance percentage is the share of a contractor's total work order volume, or total labor hours, that comes from scheduled preventive maintenance rather than reactive, unplanned, or emergency service calls.

PM completion rate is the percentage of scheduled preventive maintenance visits that are actually completed within their due window, out of all PM visits scheduled for a period.

PM compliance rate is the percentage of agreement-covered equipment that is currently up to date with its preventive maintenance schedule, based on the visit intervals defined in the service agreement.

Schedule adherence measures how closely technicians arrive and complete jobs within their scheduled time windows, expressed as the percentage of visits that start on time against the dispatched schedule.

A service level agreement (SLA) is the contractual commitment between a contractor and a customer that defines how fast service work will be acknowledged, responded to, and resolved — typically written into a commercial service or maintenance agreement as the performance standard the shop is measured against.

SLA compliance rate is the percentage of jobs performed under SLA-covered agreements that meet their contractual response and resolution windows, calculated against all covered visits in a period.

Technician productivity metrics are the set of numbers used to assess how much billable work a technician produces and how well that work holds — with utilization, wrench time, and first-time fix rate as the core set, each answering a different question about the technician's day.

Technician utilization is the percentage of a technician's available paid hours that are billed to customer work, calculated by dividing billable hours by total scheduled or paid hours over a period.

Time to invoice is how long a completed job sits before it's billed — the lag between work order completion and the invoice date — and it's the controllable half of the cash collection cycle.

Windshield time is the time a technician spends driving between jobs rather than working on one — measured in hours per day or as a share of paid time — and it's the direct cost of poor route and dispatch sequencing.

Work order backlog is the count, and average age, of open work orders that are unscheduled, unassigned, or otherwise not yet completed, tracked to see how much demand is outpacing dispatch capacity.

Wrench time is the percentage of a technician's paid working hours actually spent performing repair, install, or maintenance work on site, as opposed to driving, waiting, or handling paperwork.