Note
Five Numbers to Capture Before You Change How Work Runs
If you are planning to change how your operation runs, do one thing first: write down five numbers. Not estimates. Actual figures pulled from recent jobs.
Contractors who skip this step often cannot answer, six months later, whether anything improved. They remember that some things felt different. They do not remember what their billing cycle looked like before. Without a baseline, improvement becomes a feeling rather than a fact.
Why Do These Numbers Matter?
A baseline does not require a system to produce. It requires two to three hours going through invoices, job sheets, and LINE chat history. The goal is to freeze the current state before anything changes, so there is something real to compare against once a change has settled in.
The five numbers below are not abstract metrics. Each one corresponds to a specific operational problem that shows up in Thai factory electrical work: late invoices, return trips to collect signatures, gaps in the maintenance calendar, and capacity that nobody can see.
What Are the Five Numbers?
1. Days from site completion to invoice sent
Take your last ten completed jobs. For each one, find the date the crew finished on site and the date the invoice went out. Calculate the average gap in calendar days.
For an electrical contractor who has not standardized this process, the figure typically sits somewhere between 12 and 30 days. The exact number matters less than having it written down.
Every day in that gap is a day the customer holds the value and you do not hold the money. If a process change brings that average from 18 days to 6, you want to be able to show the 18. If you did not write it down before, the 6 is just a number with nothing to prove it against.
2. Return trips per project
Go through your last ten completed projects. Count how many required a crew member or coordinator to return to the site after the main work was done: to collect a signature, retake a photo, correct a document, or confirm a reading. Count the trips, not the reasons.
Divide the total by 10. That is your average return trips per project.
Return trips consume technician-days already allocated to other work. They sometimes delay the handover, which delays the invoice. A working site process should reduce this number. You need the current figure to know whether any change actually did.
3. Technician-days booked versus available last month
Take last month. Count your total available technician working days: permanent staff count multiplied by working days in the month, minus leave and training. Then count how many of those days were actually assigned to site work.
Divide assigned by available and multiply by 100. That is your utilisation rate for last month.
A figure below 60 percent often signals unbooked capacity you are still paying for. A figure above 90 percent means the schedule is running too tight to absorb anything going wrong. Knowing your current rate tells you whether a scheduling change is solving a real problem or just moving things around.
If you have never calculated this before, run it on last month and the month before. See whether the number is stable or swinging.
4. Open jobs not yet invoiced
At this exact moment, how many jobs sit in this state: site work complete, customer has informally accepted delivery, but the invoice has not gone out?
Count them from actual records, not from memory. These are jobs you have finished. The work is done. Something administrative is holding up the invoice: a missing signature, a photo set not filed, a handover document incomplete.
Most contractors who count this number for the first time are surprised by how many jobs sit in that gap. Freeze the count now so you can compare it three months later.
5. Sites with no next appointment set
After an installation closes, two things should follow: a warranty clock starts, and a next inspection date gets scheduled. Under the Factory Act, electrical systems in controlled factories require periodic safety inspections. This is not discretionary.
Go through your completed site list from the last 12 months. Count how many have no inspection date recorded and no maintenance contact assigned.
Sites with no next appointment tend to become sites you lose. No appointment means no reason for the customer to call, no crew to schedule, and no maintenance revenue to plan for. If 14 out of your last 20 closed sites have nothing scheduled, that is the number to write down.
How Should You Gather This Data?
You do not need a system in place to collect these numbers. A spreadsheet is sufficient.
The data exists in:
- Invoices: sent dates and job reference numbers
- Job sheets or site reports: last day on site (or the timestamp on the final site photo, if those are the only records)
- LINE group chat history: return trip requests, confirmation messages, and site-update threads
- Staff roster: headcount and leave records for calculating available days
Budget two to three hours. The work is tedious, not complicated.
What to Do Once You Have Them
Write the numbers on paper. Date it. Put it somewhere you can find it in four months.
Do not try to act on the numbers right now. Their only job at this point is to give you a comparison point after a change. When someone asks three months from now whether things are better, you will have a specific answer instead of a feeling.
FAQ
Can I gather these if my records are disorganized?
Yes. The figures will be rougher, but they are still useful. Start with whatever invoices you have and the last ten completed job sheets. If those are incomplete, use the LINE chat history: find the message where the crew said they were done and the confirmation that the invoice went out. A rough number from real sources beats a clean number estimated from memory.
What if the numbers look fine and I am not sure anything needs changing?
That is a valid result. These five numbers are not an argument for change. If your billing cycle is already short, return trips are rare, and most closed sites have a next appointment, the operational picture is healthier than average. The numbers still have value as written evidence of that.
Do I need to update these numbers every month?
Not necessarily. Update them when something significant changes: a new system goes in, a key coordinator leaves, you take on a new project type, or the permanent crew expands. For number 4 (open jobs not yet invoiced), a monthly glance is worth doing regardless of other changes, because that gap tends to grow quietly.
These five numbers will not fix anything on their own. But changing an operation without them means working without a reference point. Six months of effort with nothing to measure against is how improvement stays invisible, and how good decisions get reversed because nobody could show they worked.
If you want to talk through where these numbers sit in your current setup before committing to a change, the /schedule-a-call/ page is a good place to start.