Guides
Price locksmith services: five margin leaks to audit
Price locksmith services without leaking margin: read a month of invoices against your sheet and find the five places the money goes, then retest.
A price sheet can look right and still lose money. The way to find out is to read last month's invoices against it, not to rebuild it from scratch. Each leak below has a sign on the invoice and a fix on the sheet.
What to take away
- Margin leaks in small, repeatable places, and each one shows up on invoices you already have.
- Audit the sheet part by partservice call fee, labor by task, parts and surcharges.
- Two leaks sit outside the sheetdiscounts at the door and slow collections.
- A rekey that fails twice costs more than the discount that won it, so track callbacks by cause.
- Retest the revised sheet for one month, and confirm licensing and insurance requirements with your state licensing board before you publish a price.
Set the yardstick first
Every leak is measured against one number: what an hour of billable work costs you. It comes from wage, payroll burden, van cost and billable hours, not from what a competitor quotes over the phone.
Cost Per Billable Hour
- Whourly wage
- Bpayroll burden decimal
- Vmonthly van, fuel, insurance, phone
- Hbillable hours per van per month
Let W be the hourly wage of a technician's time and B the payroll burden as a decimal, including taxes, workers' comp and paid time off. Let V be the monthly cost of van, fuel, insurance and phone, and H the billable hours the van produces in a month. The floor is W times (1 + B), plus V divided by H.
Most first-year owners skip the burden and the van. Both are real money, and both leave the shop the same week the wage does.
Pull one month of invoices
Take the last month and read each job against the floor.
- List every job with its type, its price and the time it took, including the drive.
- Mark each job that came back, and write down why.
- Mark each discount and who gave it.
- Note how many days each commercial invoice took to collect.
Five patterns can surface, and the table matches each one to the fix.
| Leak | What it looks like | What fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| Unbilled drive time | A 2 a.m. call forty minutes out priced like a local one | After-hours surcharge and a stated service radius |
| Callback rework | The same rekey returns twice | Track cause; retrain or reprice the task |
| Parts absorbed into flat rates | Cylinders and blanks disappear into labor | Line-item parts on every invoice |
| Discounts given at the door | Technician negotiates to close | One published discount, approved in advance |
| Slow collections on commercial work | Net-30 turns into net-60 | Deposits on keying schedules over a set size |
Four leaks inside the sheet
A price is built from four parts, and each part can leak. Check them one at a time against the jobs you listed.
Service call fee
The fee covers the drive and the first block of time. A residential lockout is fifteen minutes of work and forty minutes of driving, so a fee that ignores the drive gives the time away. State what it includes and charge it on every call. How to set it is covered in service call minimums.
Labor by task
A rekey, a cylinder replacement and a mortise repair each need a set price. Time them yourself before you set it. When a task keeps coming back, the price is paying for the repeat work. Retrain the task or reprice it, because a discount cannot make up for a rekey that fails twice.
Parts
Key blanks, cylinders, deadbolts and strikes carry a markup you set yourself. The markup covers stocking, not just the part. Without a line item, a $40 cylinder vanishes inside a flat rate and nobody sees it leave.
Four Parts of a Price
- Service call fee covers drive and first block
- Labor by taskrekey, cylinder, mortise
- Parts at a stated markup
- Surcharges named in advance
Surcharges
Name them in advance: after-hours, holidays, a second trip, restricted keyway stock and disposal of old hardware. A surcharge that appears only on the invoice reads as an argument. One printed on the sheet reads as policy, and your dispatcher can quote it without apology.
Two leaks outside the sheet
Discounts and slow payment do not appear on the price sheet, so they escape most audits. Both show up in the invoice record instead.
When a technician negotiates at the door to close, the sheet stops being the price. Publish one discount and approve it in advance, so that the person in the driveway is not setting margin.
Commercial work adds a second drain. Days to collect belongs on the same report as revenue. Booked work is not cash, and a keying schedule for a property manager can sit unpaid while you buy the cylinders.
Retest for one month
Run one month with the revised sheet and compare it to the month before. Look at three numbers: average invoice, billable hours per van per day, and callback count.
If average invoice rose and callbacks rose with it, you underpriced the task, not the customer. If both held, publish the sheet. Once it works, package locksmith services into bundles a customer can compare.
Records and claims behind a price
The IRS says in Publication 583 that you need good records to monitor the progress of your business, and that records can show what changes you need to make. Invoices, callback notes and collection dates are exactly that.
Any advertised price, response time or "no call-out fee" claim has to hold up. The FTC says advertisers must have evidence to back up their claims.
Licensing is handled at the state and local level, not federally. Some states leave it to cities and counties. Requirements vary, so check the board or register that governs your service area before you print a sheet.
Common questions
Which leak should I fix first?
The one your own invoices show most. Start with the part of the sheet it sits in, then retest for a month before touching anything else.
Should I match the shop down the street?
No. Their cost structure is not yours, and their quoted price may not be the price they collect. Use their number as a market signal, then price from your own cost per billable hour.
How do I price a job I have never done?
Estimate the hours, add the parts, and add a margin for the unknown. Track the actual time on the first three, then set a fixed price from what you learned.
When should I raise prices?
When your cost per billable hour rises and your average invoice has not. Raise the tasks that leak first, and tell commercial accounts before the next schedule, not after.
