The Best Dashboard for an Electrical Business: What to Track and When

Most electrical shops run three businesses at once: service and repair, residential new construction, and commercial work. Each has different cycle times, different margin profiles, and different leading indicators. Stacking them into a single "revenue this week" number obscures what is actually happening. A dashboard built for one stream misleads you on the other two.

This post breaks the electrical contractor dashboard by cadence (daily, weekly, monthly) and by the differences between work types. The benchmarks at the end give you a target for each metric so you know when a number is worth acting on. For the broader framework, see home service dashboard metrics and pair this with what KPIs an electrical business should track.

Why Work Type Changes Everything

A service and repair call closes the same day. A residential new construction job runs 4-16 weeks from permit to final. A commercial project can be 6-18 months with progress billing. These are not the same business in terms of cash flow, bidding, or scheduling.

Service and repair has high velocity and high margin. The risk is tech utilization and callback rate. New construction has predictable volume but thin margins compressed by GC pricing pressure. Commercial has the highest absolute dollar value but the longest AR cycles and the most payment risk.

Running one dashboard that averages all three together is like averaging a sprinter's metrics with a marathon runner's. The numbers look reasonable. Neither athlete is actually being managed.

Daily Numbers

Open Bids by Project Size

Every morning you need a count of outstanding bids, grouped by size bucket: under $2,500, $2,500 to $15,000, over $15,000. Service and repair bids that have been open longer than 48 hours are cooling off fast. New construction and commercial bids have longer decision cycles but need a follow-up trigger at 7 days and 14 days.

A large open-bid queue sounds like a pipeline. It can also be a signal that something in the follow-up process has broken. Count them and categorize by age.

Tech Utilization

Hours billed divided by hours clocked, per technician, per day. The target for a productive service and repair shop is 80 to 90 percent billable time. Below 70 percent and you are paying for truck time that is not producing revenue.

ServiceTitan surfaces this on the Technician Report. Jobber requires a manual calculation from job duration versus time-on-clock. Housecall Pro shows scheduled hours versus worked hours but does not compute the ratio automatically.

Permit-Pending Jobs

For residential new construction, the number of jobs that cannot start because permits have not been issued. Permits are the single biggest scheduling bottleneck. Track daily so dispatch knows which slots are actually open and which are held up by the permitting office.

Text Clint: "how many open bids are older than 48 hours and what is the total dollar value?"

Weekly Numbers

Bid Conversion Rate by Job Type

Win rate split by service/repair versus new construction versus commercial. Aggregate win rate hides problems. A shop with a 55% overall win rate might be at 68% on service work and 22% on commercial. Those call for different actions: the commercial number might mean your pricing is out of market or you are chasing the wrong project types.

Track this weekly because bid volume can be low enough that monthly tracking gives you too small a sample.

Revenue Per Tech Per Day

Total revenue divided by techs in the field divided by working days. This is the single most important operational number for a service and repair shop. A 6-tech shop billing $24,000 per week is averaging $800 per tech per day. That is healthy. The same shop billing $16,000 is averaging $533 per tech per day, which suggests utilization gaps, low ticket size, or both.

Industry benchmarks from ServiceTitan's 2026 Benchmark Report put top-quartile electrical service shops at $1,000 to $1,400 revenue per tech per day. For the full per-tech metric set, see technician performance metrics for home services.

Callback Rate

Jobs that required a return visit within 14 days of the original completion, as a percentage of total completed jobs. The target is under 5 percent. Above 8 percent and you have a quality or diagnostic problem that is costing you rework time and damaging customer relationships.

Callback rate is the operational quality check that tech utilization and revenue per day miss entirely. A tech can be 90 percent utilized running callbacks and look productive while generating no net revenue.

Text Clint: "callback rate by technician for the last 4 weeks"

Monthly Numbers

Gross Margin by Job Type

This is the number that tells you whether the business mix is working. Service and repair should run 50 to 65 percent gross margin. New construction runs 25 to 40 percent. Commercial runs 30 to 45 percent depending on project size and GC relationship.

If new construction is pulling your overall margin below 40 percent, the question is whether the volume justifies the margin compression. For most shops under $5M, service and repair at 55 percent margin is worth more than new construction at 30 percent margin even with the same gross revenue. See job profitability for home services for the deeper margin lens.

Lead Source ROI

Cost per booked job by acquisition channel. Google Ads, Yelp, Angi, referrals, repeat customers. For service and repair, the benchmark is a cost per booked job under 15 percent of average ticket. If your average service ticket is $450 and you are paying $90 per booked job, you are at the line. Above it and the acquisition math starts breaking. See how to track lead source in a service CRM for the underlying tagging discipline.

New construction does not fit this metric because jobs come through GC relationships, not advertising. Track GC relationship revenue separately.

AR Aging for Commercial Work

Accounts receivable broken by aging bucket (current, 30 days, 60 days, 90+ days). Commercial billing is almost always net-30 or net-45. Progress billing on large projects can stretch to 60 days routinely. The signal you are watching for is the 90-plus bucket growing month over month, which means you have clients who are not paying on schedule and need a call.

ServiceTitan has a built-in AR aging report. Jobber's receivables widget tracks aging but does not segment by job type. Housecall Pro requires a manual CSV export and pivot.

Text Clint: "gross margin by job type for last month and which job types are below 40%?"

CRM Coverage: What Each Platform Tracks Natively

ServiceTitan is built for the commercial and multi-tech electrical shop. Bid conversion tracking, technician scorecards, job costing against estimated hours, and AR aging are all native. The trade-off is implementation complexity and a price point that starts around $500 per month.

Jobber is the right fit for a service and repair shop under $3M in revenue. Job tracking, invoicing, and lead source attribution are clean. New construction project tracking is weaker. Commercial AR aging requires manual spreadsheet work.

Housecall Pro sits between the two. Good for residential service work. Tech performance tracking requires the more expensive Pro Plus tier. Not built for commercial billing cycles or permit-tracking workflows.

None of the three pull your accounting data (QuickBooks, Xero) automatically without a third-party connector. Job cost versus estimated cost requires a manual match unless you are on ServiceTitan's enterprise tier.

Benchmarks Reference

Commercial benchmarks from the National Electrical Contractors Association 2025 Financial Performance Report. Service benchmarks from ServiceTitan's 2026 Benchmark Report.

How Clint Connects Bid Data, Tech Hours, and Accounting

Getting gross margin by job type out of most CRMs requires pulling job revenue from one report, labor cost from the tech schedule, and materials cost from the invoice. Then matching those three against each other in a spreadsheet. That is a Friday morning project, not a Tuesday morning check.

Clint connects to your CRM and accounting system simultaneously. When you ask "what is gross margin by job type for the last 30 days?" it pulls job invoices from Jobber or ServiceTitan, matches against QuickBooks job costs, and returns the calculation in plain English. No export. No pivot table. No manual matching.

The same connection covers tech utilization across multiple data points. A question like "which techs are under 70 percent billable this week?" requires pulling clocked hours and billed hours from two different reports in most CRMs. Clint reads both and answers directly.

Text Clint: "revenue per tech per day for this week, callback rate for this month, and which open bids are over 7 days old with no follow-up logged?"

Sources

• ServiceTitan 2026 Benchmark Report for Electrical Contractors
• National Electrical Contractors Association 2025 Financial Performance Report
• HomeAdvisor: How Much Do Electricians Charge
• Profitability Partners: Electrical Contractor Profit Margins
• Jobber Help Center: Insights Dashboard
• Housecall Pro: Reports Overview