Windshield time
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.
The inputs.
- Drive timeTime technicians spend driving between jobs rather than working on one — the direct cost of poor route sequencing.
- Paid hoursTotal paid hours for the period, so drive time reads as a share of the working day.
- Read withWrench time and technician utilization — the two productivity numbers windshield time drains.
What to know.
How to calculate windshield time
Windshield time is the sum of drive time between dispatched stops, expressed either as hours per technician per day or as a share of total paid hours. Drive time isn't billable, so it sits in the denominator of both technician utilization and wrench time — which is why watching the number usually starts with watching those two. The practical version most shops track is average windshield time per tech per day, trended over weeks rather than read as a single snapshot.
Why windshield time matters for commercial contractors
Every paid hour spent driving is an hour that produces no billable work, and on a book of 10 to 200 technicians a few minutes of excess drive time per stop compounds into meaningful lost capacity every day. Multi-site commercial accounts make it worse, since jobs are scattered across a metro area rather than clustered in neighborhoods. Windshield time is the cheapest efficiency lever a contractor has — cutting it doesn't require hiring, it requires sequencing.
What drives windshield time up
The usual drivers are scheduling by call-in order instead of geography, dispatching without live technician location, techs running back to the shop for parts mid-day, and crews spread across far-flung sites instead of clustered by area. Each of these is a dispatch decision, not a workforce problem — which means they're all correctable in the dispatch function rather than with more headcount.
How Thermal reduces windshield time
Thermal's dispatch board shows technician location, skill, and schedule gaps together, and highlights suggested job matches and sequencing for a dispatcher to review and apply — so route decisions are made with geography and schedule visible instead of from a call log. Because the same board drives assignment and arrival timestamps, the effect on windshield time shows up in the data as visits get sequenced by area.
Questions attached to this term.
Does windshield time count as paid time?
Yes — it's paid hours, it just isn't billable. That's why it sits in the denominator of wrench time and technician utilization, pulling both down as drive time goes up.
How is windshield time different from wrench time?
Wrench time is hands-on-tool hours against paid hours; windshield time is drive hours against paid hours. They're the two ends of the same day — more drive time almost always means less wrench time.
What's a reasonable amount of windshield time per day?
There's no universal number — it depends on route density, the geography you cover, and the balance of commercial to residential work. Track it as a trend and watch the effect on utilization instead of chasing a fixed target.
How does route sequencing actually cut windshield time?
Grouping stops by location rather than taking them in call-in order shortens the gaps between jobs, and dispatching the nearest available technician to each new call keeps drive time down as the day unfolds.
These numbers, on your own book.
If you want to see them calculated from real work orders and agreements rather than a spreadsheet, that's a demo.