Auto Repair P&L Template

Each month, enter your revenue by service category and your parts cost and technician labor cost in the COGS section. Then switch to the Labor & Parts Analysis sheet and enter that month's car count, billable hours, and total technician hours clocked — this takes about five minutes once you're familiar with the sheet. The ELR, technician efficiency, parts margin, and ARO figures calculate automatically. If your shop management software (Mitchell, R.O. Writer, Tekmetric, or similar) produces a monthly summary report, those figures map directly onto this template.

An auto repair P&L needs to treat labor and parts as separate revenue streams with separate cost structures. Labor revenue minus technician wages gives you labor gross profit; parts revenue minus parts cost gives you parts gross profit. These two numbers behave very differently — labor margin is primarily a function of your posted labor rate and technician efficiency, while parts margin is driven by your supplier pricing, markup strategy, and whether you're losing ticket share to customers who source their own parts. Key benchmarks: a healthy shop typically targets a parts-to-labor ratio between 0.8:1 and 1.2:1, an ELR at or above the posted door rate, and a technician efficiency rate of 90–110%. Average repair order (ARO) is the single most useful top-line metric because it captures both car count and revenue per ticket.