Contractor Performance: Four Numbers to Track per Vendor
Concoct team
Your refrigeration contractor's quote for store four just came in noticeably higher than last year. You want to push back. Then you realize you cannot say why. Is he slow? Does he come back twice for every job? You have a feeling, and a feeling does not survive a phone call with someone who has been doing this for decades.
Vendor performance tracking fixes that, and it does not need a scorecard with fifteen columns. Four numbers per contractor, kept for a quarter, will tell you who to call first, who to renegotiate with and who to quietly stop using.
The four numbers
For each vendor, track acknowledgement time, time to complete, repeat visits and cost per visit. Each answers a different question. Together they stop you from rewarding the cheap vendor who makes three trips or punishing the expensive one who fixes it once.
1. Acknowledgement time
The question: how long until someone on their side says "we have it"?
Measure from the moment you assign the job to the moment the vendor accepts, declines or gives an arrival time. Do not measure to arrival. Arrival depends on traffic, parts and the day. Acknowledgement depends on whether they are paying attention to you.
It is the best early signal of how a vendor behaves when something is on fire. A contractor who takes two days to answer a routine request will not get fast at 9pm on a Saturday. Track the median, not the average, so one slow weekend does not hide a normally quick vendor.
2. Time to complete
The question: from assignment to closed, how many days does a job take?
Split it by priority if you can. An emergency that takes four days and a low-priority job that takes four days are very different facts. Note how many days a job sat in "waiting on parts" too. That is sometimes the vendor's fault and sometimes the supplier's, and you want to know which.
Watch for a vendor who is fast to arrive and slow to finish. It often means a quick look, a part that was not on the truck, and a second trip next week.
3. Repeat visits
The question: how often does the same problem come back?
Count a repeat as a second work order for the same piece of equipment with a similar fault inside a window you choose. Thirty days is one common choice, but confirm what suits your trade. Keep the window the same for every vendor, or the comparison means nothing.
Some repeats are not the vendor's fault. A compressor near the end of its life will keep failing no matter who fixes it. That is why this number works best with history per piece of equipment, not just per vendor. Concoct keeps equipment records, so link jobs to the unit when you create them.
4. Cost per visit
The question: what does one trip cost you, all in?
Add the invoice total, including parts and after-hours or trip charges, and divide by visits. Then look at cost per job, which includes the repeat trips. A vendor with a lower rate who needs two visits per job can cost more than the one who charges more and fixes it first time. Compare like with like: a plumber and a refrigeration tech are not comparable.
Setting your own baseline
We will not give you industry benchmarks. They vary by trade, region and how rural your sites are. Run the numbers for one quarter without changing anything, rank your vendors on each, and look at the outliers at either end. Illustratively, a vendor who acknowledges in two hours against one who takes two days is a real gap. 2.1 hours against 2.6 is not.
What Concoct records and what you calculate
Concoct records the events. Each work order carries who it was assigned to, whether the vendor accepted or declined, the arrival time they gave, status changes (including waiting on parts), and completion with the vendor's short written note. The vendor does this from a link emailed to them, with no account. See how that works for vendors who refuse another app. Check how precisely dates and times show in your own account before you build a routine on them.
Concoct does not produce a per-vendor scorecard. It does not calculate your acknowledgement median, repeat-visit rate or cost per visit and rank your contractors. You take the dates and totals from the work orders and do the arithmetic yourself, in a spreadsheet if you like.
Two more limits:
- Vendors cannot attach invoices through the portal. They email them, and your team attaches them to the work order. Cost data only exists if someone does that step.
- Spend and budget reporting is on the Professional tier. On Starter or Growth, you pull invoice totals from the work orders yourself.
One thing the system does handle: if a vendor does not respond to an assignment for 24 hours, it is automatically unassigned and your owners and operations managers are alerted to reassign it by hand. It does not pick a backup vendor. That gap is itself a data point, so count how often each vendor triggers it.
A simple quarterly routine
- List every completed vendor job for the quarter.
- For each vendor, write down the four numbers.
- Flag any vendor that is an outlier on two or more.
- Talk to each flagged vendor. "Your last six jobs averaged three days to close, and two needed a second visit" beats "we have been unhappy."
- Re-run it next quarter and see if anything moved.
Many vendors respond well to seeing their own numbers. The good ones are often glad someone noticed. For the wider picture, see franchise maintenance across every location, in one place.
Concoct is priced per location with unlimited users, so everyone who needs to see vendor history can. See the pricing page, or book a demo and we will show you what a vendor's work-order record looks like.
FAQ
How many jobs do I need before these numbers mean anything?
There is no magic number. With fewer than five or six jobs per vendor in a quarter, treat the numbers as hints, not evidence. If volume is low, roll quarters together.
Should I tell vendors I am tracking them?
Yes. It is fairer and usually improves behaviour on its own. Share the numbers calmly and ask what is getting in the way. Sometimes the cause is something you control, like unclear access instructions or slow approvals.
What about vendors I only use for emergencies?
Track acknowledgement time and cost per visit, and skip the rest. For emergency vendors, how fast they pick up is most of what you are buying.
Does Concoct calculate these four numbers for me?
No. It records the underlying events, such as assignment, acceptance, arrival time, status changes and completion, and lets you link work orders to equipment records. The per-vendor calculations are yours to do.
Can vendors see their own performance numbers?
No. Vendors see only the single job on their link, and the link stops working when the job is closed or cancelled. Any numbers you share come from your own review.