The basics1 of 3
What flat rate means
You're paid per job, not per hour at the shop. Every job has a book time, a number of hours a labor guide says it should take. Finish it and you're paid that many hours at your rate, whether it took you two hours or four. That's the deal: beat the book and you win, get stuck and you eat it.
Flagged vs clocked
Flagged hours are the book hours on the jobs you finished. That's what the check is based on.
Clocked hours are the hours you were punched in at the shop.
Do a 3.0 job in 2 hours and you flagged 3.0 on 2.0 clocked. Two different numbers, and only one of them is on the shop's time card.
Why hours look like 1.3 and not 1:20
Flat rate counts in tenths of an hour, because that's how labor guides are written and how payroll runs. One tenth is six minutes. 0.5 is half an hour. 1.3 is an hour and eighteen minutes. If your stub prints hundredths (74.25), that's the same idea, just finer.
Efficiency
Flagged divided by clocked. Flag 10 hours in an 8-hour day and you're at 125%. Flag 6 and you're at 75%. Over 100% means you beat the book across the day. One bad day doesn't say much. A month of them says a lot, and you only see that if somebody wrote it down.
How you get paid2 of 3
Pay periods
Most shops pay on flag hours totaled over a period, usually two weeks, sometimes one. Many have a guarantee, a minimum you're paid even if the flags don't get there, and some have tiers where the rate goes up past a certain number of hours. Whatever your plan is, the period is the unit. Knowing on Tuesday that you're behind pace is worth more than finding out on payday.
Book time, warranty time, customer pay
The same job can carry more than one time. Customer pay is usually the time quoted at the counter. Warranty time, set by the manufacturer, is usually lower, sometimes a lot lower. Warranty times aren't a perfect measure of a job. But the gap between warranty and quoted time on the same op code is real, and a tech who logs both can see exactly how wide it is on their own work.
When the check is short3 of 3
How a check comes up short
Not every short is somebody's fault. Almost all of them are invisible if you kept no record. The ones I've seen most:
- A line gets dropped. The RO was closed with an op code missing, or a line was paid at 0.0.
- The time on the line changed. Flagged at 2.4 on the ticket, paid at 1.8 on the stub. Nobody told you.
- Warranty time paid on a customer-pay job, or a policy adjustment nobody mentioned.
- A split RO where your lines ended up under somebody else's number.
- The comeback. You did it twice and got paid once.
- Waiting. Parts, approvals, a lift. Not paid, not counted, and it eats the day.
- The period boundary. An RO closed on the last day lands in the wrong period, or in neither.
What to do about it
- 1Keep your own record. Every RO, every line, every flagged tenth, the day you did it. Paper works. A phone works better, because it adds up.
- 2Check the stub against it. Not the total, the lines. The total hides which one went missing.
- 3Walk in with lines, not a feeling. "I'm short" starts an argument. "RO 48213, line 2, 1.8 flagged, paid 0.0" ends one. Most offices fix a documented miss without a fight.
- 4Record what came back. Over a year, that number tells you whether the checking was worth it. (It is.)
What this has to do with the app
Flat Rate Ledger is the record in step 1 and the check in step 2. You log the RO, it adds up flagged and clocked, shows pace against your goal, and when the stub comes you type in what it paid and it shows the short, line by line. Free during the beta. Guest mode needs no account at all.