Free tool
What a few approval points are worth in your shop
Enter your weekly ticket count, what your technicians typically write up per inspection and how much approval you expect photos to add.
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How much technician time do photo inspections really cost
Size the weekly hours a full digital inspection program takes before you promise your technicians it will only take a minute.
Inspection programs fail in the bay, not at the counter. A flat rate technician doing a fifteen minute courtesy inspection with photos on every car is doing real work, and if the shop has not planned for those hours the technician quietly stops taking pictures by the third week. This planner turns the promise into a number you can look at.
Put in your daily car count, the minutes an inspection honestly takes including the photos, and your technician headcount and paid hours. The result shows the weekly hours the program consumes and what share of your floor capacity that is. If the share looks uncomfortable, the fix is usually fewer inspected vehicles or a shorter standard sheet, not asking people to work faster.
Your result
Inspection hours per week
24.5
Total floor time the inspection program takes across the shop.
Available technician hours per week
120
Paid hours on the floor before any of it is sold.
Share of technician hours used, percent
Anything above twenty percent needs a plan for how it gets paid.
Inspections per technician per day
4.7
The daily load each technician carries on top of billed jobs.
These hours are floor time only and do not include the advisor minutes spent pricing and sending the link.
How shops pay for inspection time
There are three common answers and all of them are defensible. Some shops build a small flat amount into every courtesy inspection and pay it as a posted time. Some fold the inspection into the labor time of the job that brought the car in, so the oil change carries it. Some pay a share of the approved work that came from the inspection, which lines the technician up with the outcome.
What does not work is silence. If nobody says how the fifteen minutes gets paid, a flat rate technician will treat inspections as unpaid time and the photos will get thinner every week until they stop. Decide the answer before the first day, say it out loud at the Monday meeting, and check the photo count per ticket after two weeks.
Trimming the sheet without losing the sale
If the share of hours comes back higher than you can carry, shorten the standard inspection rather than the photo standard. A tight sheet that covers brakes, tires, fluids, belts, wipers, lights and battery, each with one measurement and one photo, sells better than a forty item sheet with no pictures on it.
You can also stage it. Full inspections on every maintenance visit, a shorter check on a same day diagnostic where the customer is waiting. The point is that the technician always knows which sheet applies before the hood goes up, because the decision made on the fly is the one that gets skipped.
Questions about this calculator
Is fifteen minutes realistic for a full inspection?
It is realistic for a practiced technician on a familiar vehicle with the gauges within reach. First month numbers run longer, often twenty five minutes, because the photo habit is new. Use your real times after four weeks rather than the number you hope for.
Should advisor time be included here?
This planner counts floor time only, so the results reflect what you are asking technicians to absorb. Advisor time is real too, usually a few minutes per ticket to price the lines and send the link, but it comes out of a different budget.
What share of technician hours is too much?
There is no single line, but above roughly a fifth of paid floor hours most shops need an explicit pay answer and a shorter sheet. Below that, inspections generally absorb into the day without anyone feeling squeezed.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The digital vehicle inspection rollout checklist
Everything a shop has to decide, install and say out loud before the first inspection link goes to a customer, and what to check every week afterward.
From this number to a graded inspection
The figure above assumes a technician actually wipes the rotor, shoots the pad next to a gauge and types the measurement into the caption. A demo shows what that looks like from under a lift and what the customer taps on the other end. Bring your own inputs and we will run it on your shop rather than an average one.