How much are status calls costing you?

This calculator is an opportunity-cost model, not a magic number. It starts from the three inputs you control with the sliders: jobs per week, average job value, and status calls per job. Multiplying jobs by calls gives your total weekly call volume, and each call is budgeted at four minutes. That four-minute figure is deliberately conservative: it covers picking up, walking over to check the job, relaying the answer, and getting your head back into the work you were doing.

To turn wasted minutes into dollars, the model derives an implied hourly rate from your average job value, assuming a typical job takes about two hours of active work. A $150 average ticket implies roughly $75 per working hour. Hours lost to calls multiplied by that implied rate gives your weekly loss, which is then projected to a month (4.33 weeks) and a year (52 weeks). The model treats interrupted time as billable time, which is the honest framing for an owner-operator: a minute spent saying "should be ready tomorrow" is a minute not spent on the job that pays.

What the benchmark is based on

The "average shop" comparison bar uses a fixed reference profile: three status calls per job at four minutes per call, which works out to roughly $1,200 per month of interrupted time for a typical small service business. It exists to give your number context, not to rank you scientifically. If your bar is well above it, your customers are chasing you for updates more than most.

What to do with your result

First, sanity-check the inputs: count actual status calls across one normal day before trusting the yearly figure. Second, notice which slider moves your number most. For nearly every shop it is calls per job, and that is also the only one you can change without changing your business. Proactive updates, whether sent manually or automatically through a tool like FixyFlow, attack that slider directly: customers who already know the status have no reason to call. Use the emailed report if you want the same math broken down with your specific numbers.