Overview
Budgeted Hours (BH) represent the estimated time it should take your crew to complete a specific job in the field. This number becomes the benchmark for measuring field team efficiency, job costing accuracy, and ultimately your profitability.
Think of BH as your target for how long a job should take. It’s not how long it did take (that’s actual time), and it’s not for internal admin or office work. This is strictly used to track production-based labor such as mowing, pruning, mulch installs, cleanups, etc.
🛠️ How BH Is Used in Copilot for Field Teams
Job Costing
BH is foundational to knowing if a job was profitable.
After the crew clocks in and out of a job, Copilot compares their actual hours to the budgeted hours. This allows you to calculate:
Job Profitability
Labor Efficiency
Over/Under time
Crew Accountability (especially with Pay for Performance)
If you're using P4P (Pay for Performance), BH becomes how you score the job.
A crew that beats BH (finishes early) without call-backs gets rewarded with higher pay.
A crew that drags or does sloppy work may lose out.
Scheduling & Capacity Planning
Copilot uses BH to plan the daily route. Each crew has a max number of hours per day (like 16 BH for an 8-hour shift with 2 people).
If a job is 4 BH, it takes up 25% of their day. This helps prevent overloading your routes and improves on-time completion rates.
🔍 What BH Is Not
Not used for internal office tasks or admin workflows.
Not the same as time tracking. This isn’t just clocking in/out.
Not based on how long a job took last time (unless that was already dialed in).
🎯 Best Practices for BH in Copilot
Estimate carefully. Use historical averages and your price matrix to set realistic BH.
Train crews to understand BH and how their performance is measured against it.
Update BH over time if jobs repeatedly go over/under.
🧠 "We don’t track hours to micromanage. We do it to understand production, improve efficiency, and protect margins." —Mike Andes
Example
A mulch install job is budgeted for 6 hours.
Crew of 2 arrives, clocks in via Copilot.
They finish in 5 hours and clock out.
Copilot logs:
BH = 6
Actual = 5
Crew beat budget by 1 hour (great!)
If on P4P, they may earn more.