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This whole engine answers two questions. Everything else is arithmetic.
Everything you spend in a year, plus the profit you're in business for, spread across the hours a tech is actually available. That's your burden rate — and it shows up whether he sells anything or not.
Not what you can get away with. What a good tradesman has to earn in your market to stay — buy a house, raise kids, stop looking. Set it below.
Salaried PM or salesperson earning a % of net labor sales — taken after franchise fees, CC fees, discounts and no-pays, before the commission pool. Their salary goes on ② Expenses (there's a line for it) so it's in the burden rate; the % here is the performance side. Leave empty if you don't run this position.
Quota logic: Burden rate = total cost per lead tech per hour, including your profit target built in. Each 20-day period: Quota = burden rate × actual hours worked per lead tech. Labor sales above quota = commissionable. Split is fixed at 60% crew / 40% company. The company earns its built-in profit on every hour worked, plus 40% of anything over quota.
Annual Expenses
All costs to put a tech on the road. Toggle each line monthly or annual. Totals convert to annual automatically.
Staff & Crews
Add up to 10 lead techs and 10 apprentices. Assign each lead tech to a crew. Apprentices can be assigned to a specific crew or set as a Rover — rovers work across multiple crews and their hours are entered per crew in the Commission Period tab. Up to 3 crews supported.
Labor Packages
Your packages build themselves. Once Setup and Expenses are complete, every package below carries a recommended price calculated from your burden rate — accept them with one click, or tune any multiple to your market.
Your burden rate already includes your profit — so a package priced at 1.00× covers every dollar you spend and every dollar of profit you asked for, and not one cent more. Above that is dispatch premium and commission fuel. But 1.00× only holds once the slot fills the day. Four 2-hour jobs is a day — the round-up already swallowed the drive, so 1.00× is the true floor. Small work can't fill a day the same way: six 1-hour jobs is a full day that only bills six hours, so its floor sits near 1.33×. Eight service calls bills four hours out of eight — floor near 2.00×, which is why a service charge buys the door instead of paying the bills. Set how many of each a good tech sells in a day below and the engine works the real floor out for you.
Your packages are time slots, not time estimates. A tech bids the slot that covers his whole commitment — the estimate trip, the load out, the drive, the work, the pack out, the phone calls. Four hours of work that eats his day is a day, and he says so. He always rounds up.
Performance is measured from your last calculated commission period — actual net labor sales divided by total hours worked. This gives your real revenue per hour and performance multiple against burden rate.
HVAC: $95–$175
Electrical: $75–$150
Irrigation: $75–$125
Pest Control: $65–$95
Standard operation: $125–$200/hr
Premium/specialty: $200–$350/hr
Multi-tech jobs: $150–$250/hr combined
Irrigation specialty: $125–$225/hr
Fixed-rate packages mean the customer pays the package price regardless of how long the job takes. The tech's hourly pay and the company's burden rate are both based on actual hours worked — so when a crew completes a job faster, actual cost drops while revenue stays the same. That gap between revenue and actual cost is commissionable sales. A more efficient crew generates more commissionable sales on the same package — which means larger commission checks. The package model aligns company profit and crew earnings around speed and skill, not billable clock time.
Benchmarks based on 2025–2026 industry data. Use the Pricing Advisor tab for live market analysis — enter your zip code and trade type to pull real competitor data and median income for your area.
Commission Period
Enter labor sales and hours worked per tech. Commissions calculate automatically. OT deduction applied where applicable.
Enter actual working days — excludes weekends and holidays. Standard period is ~20 days but adjust as needed.
Commission Reports
Select a report to view. Calculate a period first to populate.
Sends the selected period directly (no mail app needed). The owner gets the full report; each tech with an email gets only their own numbers — no one else's pay. Tech emails are shared with Tech Scorecards, so anything entered there is already here.
Period History
Every commission period you calculate is saved here. Click any period to open its full report.
Sends this division's saved-period KPIs and the AI Business Insights read straight to the owner/company. This is the company scorecard — not tech pay. (Charts may not render in every email app; the KPI tables and the AI read always do.)
Pricing Advisor
Labor package price recommendations based on 1,136 real transactions and $628K in verified field revenue from a Queen Creek, AZ irrigation operation. Adjusted for your trade and local market.
Every package defaults to 1 tech — a simple man-hour ladder (½, 1, 2, 4, 8). Two-man job? Sell two packages, or raise the tech count here to price it as one. Man-hours and all price recommendations update instantly.
Every scalable trade business runs on one operating principle: scope of work maps to a labor package. The package has a fixed price. Materials are listed separately at your markup. The clock is irrelevant.
Your techs don't estimate hours. They diagnose the job, assign a package, add materials, and close. A new tech learns 5 packages and prices consistently from day one. A veteran tech closes more packages per day — and earns more commission for it.
The burden rate engine ensures every package covers your costs, your profit target, and your tech's commission — before a single dollar of materials is invoiced.
Assess scope. What needs to be done. How complex. How many techs.
Scope maps to a package. Price is fixed. No hourly negotiation.
Parts listed separately. Labor and materials never mixed. Clean invoices every time.
Revenue posts. Period total grows. Tech watches their commission build toward their check.
Recommendations use four stacked calculations — starting with your salary target and working backward to required package prices.
Working backward from your target tech salary to determine the minimum annual labor sales your packages must generate.
Your burden rate ÷ $78.12 baseline. If your costs are higher, prices scale up proportionally to maintain margin.
Each trade commands a different market rate relative to irrigation. HVAC and electrical run higher; cleaning and pressure washing run lower.
Median household income for your zip code relative to Queen Creek baseline. Higher-income markets support higher pricing.
✓ Live market data: competitor density, Google review positioning, and median household income are now pulled in real time when you enter your zip code above. Baseline data: 1,136 transactions · $627,940 revenue · 2025 · Water Wise Sprinkler Repair LLC · Queen Creek, AZ