The 7 KPIs Every Collision Center Should Track Weekly

Most shops run the same monthly ritual: pull reports on the 5th, find out the 15th of last month went sideways, and by then there's nothing to do but explain it. That's not managing the business. That's narrating it. The numbers below matter because they move fast, and when you only check them at month-end, you're reacting to problems that are already three weeks old. A weekly cadence catches the same problems while you can still fix them. Here are the seven to put in front of your team every week.

1. Cycle Time (Keys-to-Keys) and Touch Time

Cycle time is calendar days from when the customer drops the car to when they pick it up. Touch time is how much of that stretch a tech actually had hands on the vehicle. The gap between the two is where cars sit waiting on parts, approvals, or a stall.

• Why it matters: Long cycle time ties up your building, delays the customer, and drags CSI down with it. Insurers watch it too.
• Read it weekly: Look at cycle time by stage, not one blended average. If cars are stacking up in the same phase week after week, that's your bottleneck. Month-end only shows you the average went up. Weekly shows you which stage did it while the car's still in the shop.

2. Work-in-Process (WIP) and On-Hand Days

WIP is everything open on the floor right now. On-hand days tells you how long that pile would take to clear at your current pace.

• Why it matters: Too little WIP and techs run out of work. Too much and cars stall, cycle time balloons, and nothing flows. There's a healthy band for your capacity, and you want to live in it.
• Read it weekly: Watch the trend and the stall-outs. A car that hasn't moved a stage in days is a target-date risk, and you want to see it Monday, not at pickup. A production board that flags stalled and at-risk ROs live beats counting them by hand.

3. Sales / RO Count vs. Capacity

This is what you took in versus what you can physically produce. Volume alone means nothing without the second half of that sentence.

• Why it matters: If intake outruns capacity, cars sit before anyone touches them. If it falls short, you're paying for a building and a crew that aren't full. Both cost you.
• Read it weekly: Compare booked and in-process work against what your throughput can actually clear. A weekly read lets you throttle scheduling before the lot jams. Wait for month-end and you've already booked three more weeks of the same mistake.

4. Gross Profit % and Gross per RO

Gross profit percent is what's left after the cost of parts, paint, sublet, and labor. Gross per RO is that same margin in dollars on the average job.

• Why it matters: You can grow sales and shrink profit at the same time if your mix shifts toward heavier parts and less labor. Percent and dollars-per-RO together tell you whether the work you're taking is worth taking.
• Read it weekly: Track gross live as ROs close, not in one lump on the 30th. If margin is slipping, you want to know which jobs are dragging it while you can still adjust the mix. Watching live RO gross profit and pacing toward your monthly target turns month-end from a surprise into a confirmation.

5. Supplement and Leakage Recovery

Supplements are the additional damage and operations you find during teardown. Leakage is everything you did but didn't get paid for, whether it never made the estimate or got negotiated away.

• Why it matters: This is money you already earned. Unbilled hours, missed operations, and blend time left off the sheet come straight out of gross profit, and nobody feels it because the work still got done.
• Read it weekly: Track supplement turnaround and how much of what you wrote actually got approved. A car waiting on supplement approval is a car not moving. Weekly, you can chase the stuck ones. Month-end, they're just a smaller number with no story attached.

6. Technician Productivity (Billed vs. Clock Hours)

Proficiency compares the flagged hours a tech produced against the hours they were on the clock. It's the clearest read on whether your labor is actually converting to billable work.

• Why it matters: A tech can be busy all day and still under-produce if they're hunting parts, waiting on approvals, or re-doing work. Low proficiency usually points at a process problem upstream, not a lazy tech.
• Read it weekly: Look at billed versus clock by tech and by team. A weekly dip tells you something changed. Maybe parts started showing up late. Wait a month and you can't reconstruct what happened on a given Tuesday.

7. CSI and Google Reviews

CSI is your post-repair survey score. Reviews are what those same customers say in public, where your next customer reads them.

• Why it matters: A repair can be perfect and the experience still sour on a missed callback or a blown promise date. CSI catches the experience, and reviews turn it into reputation that either feeds your pipeline or drains it.
• Read it weekly: Read the verbatims, not just the number. One bad week of comments about communication is a fixable process gap if you see it now. Pull surveys monthly and the pattern's already cost you a dozen customers you'll never hear from. Post-repair surveys that land while the job's fresh give you something to act on.

Everyone Sees the Same Number, or It Doesn't Work

A weekly review falls apart the second two people show up with two versions of the truth. If the estimator's cycle time doesn't match the manager's, the meeting turns into an argument about the data instead of a decision about the shop. It has to be one live source, visible to everyone, with each number owned by the person who can move it. That's the whole idea behind OPVantis. It runs alongside CCC ONE and your DMS, pulls these metrics into real-time dashboards and production boards by role and store, and shows the same live number to everyone who touches it. Track them during the month, put a name on each one, and month-end stops being the day you find out. It becomes the day you confirm what you already knew.