Windshield time is the part of a technician's paid day spent driving: between jobs, to the supply house, and to and from the shop. It is paid labor with no billable work attached to it.
The term comes from what the technician is looking at. During windshield time they are looking through the windshield, not at the equipment.
How to calculate windshield time
The cleanest method uses job-level timestamps. For each technician, over a set period:
Windshield time = Paid hours − Wrench time − Paid non-driving time (shop, training, breaks) − Idle time
If you capture arrival and departure on every job, you can measure it directly instead. Add up the gaps between one job's departure and the next job's arrival, then subtract the part of each gap that was waiting rather than driving.
To put a cost on it, take a fully loaded hourly cost per technician, C, and weekly driving hours, D:
Annual windshield cost ≈ C × D × 48 weeks
Say C is $60 and D is 12 hours. That is $34,560 a year for one truck, before you count the jobs that could have filled those hours. The windshield time cost calculator runs the same arithmetic across your crew.
Why it matters for scheduling
Windshield time is mostly decided before the truck leaves the shop. The order jobs were promised to customers sets the geography of the day. If the 8:00 is downtown, the 10:00 is forty minutes north and the 11:30 is back downtown, no dispatcher can fix that on the morning of.
That is why the biggest reduction usually comes from booking, not routing. A scheduler that checks the drive from the previous job before offering a slot never books the zig-zag in the first place. CrewLink does this: it builds live travel time into availability, so drive time sits next to the job instead of hiding inside it.
A common mistake
Booking travel as part of the job. When a two-hour block covers forty minutes of driving and eighty minutes of work, the schedule reports two hours of assigned capacity and no windshield time at all. The number exists on payroll and nowhere else. The full walkthrough is in Windshield time: what it actually costs.
Related terms
- Drive time is the travel between two specific points. Windshield time is the total of all of it across a day or week.
- Wrench time is the opposite half of the shift: hands-on work at the customer's site.
- Backtracking is the most avoidable source of windshield time.
- Technician utilization rate goes wrong when windshield time is counted as productive.
Common questions
Is windshield time the same as drive time?
Close, but not identical. Drive time usually describes a single leg, such as from job A to job B. Windshield time is the accumulated driving across a shift or a week, including trips to suppliers and the shop.
Is some windshield time unavoidable?
Yes. Field service means going to the customer, so some travel is part of the product. The goal is cutting avoidable travel: backtracking, crossing the territory twice and drives created by the order jobs were booked in.
Should windshield time be billed to customers?
Some companies charge a trip fee to recover part of it. Billing it or not is a pricing decision. Either way, measure it separately so you know what it actually costs.