Fleet Body Repair Built Around Downtime Cost

Take a straightforward example. A stake bed with rear body and gate damage: $9,400 and eleven working days on the standard path, or $11,100 and six working days with expedited parts and overtime. The delta is $1,700 for five days. If the unit produces $1,200 a day and you have no spare, the expedite returns $6,000 against a $1,700 cost. If you have a spare sitting in the yard, the expedite is a waste of $1,700.

Nobody at the shop can make that call for you, which is exactly why we put both numbers on the estimate instead of only one. What we see repeatedly is fleets that unknowingly pay the slow path on revenue units and the fast path on spares, purely because nobody was told there was a choice. Making the choice explicit is worth more to most accounts than any labor rate negotiation.

When a fleet has deferred cosmetic and body work across a dozen units, the instinct is to send everything at once and get it over with. That produces the worst possible outcome: a two week window where your capacity is gone. We stage instead. Two or three units in the shop at a time, cycled through on a rolling schedule, with the parts for the later units already ordered so no unit waits on freight while it occupies a bay.

Total calendar time on a staged program is longer, sometimes considerably. Total lost capacity is much lower, and that is the number that shows up in your revenue. The exception is a fleet with real spare depth, or a genuine seasonal shutdown, where taking everything at once is legitimately correct. We will build it either way once we know which situation you are in.

We file repairs against your unit number, not just your company name. Over a couple of years that file starts answering questions you did not ask us. Unit 14 has taken three right rear corner hits, which is not bad luck, it is either a route with a bad loading dock approach or a driver who needs backing training. Unit 22 has $18,000 of body repair on a unit worth $26,000, which is a replacement decision somebody should be making deliberately.

None of that analysis is complicated, and most fleets under fifty units are not tracking it anywhere. We will pull the history on request when you are building a budget or making a replacement case, and we will flag a pattern when we notice one rather than quietly repairing the same corner a fourth time.

Posted rates are $210 per hour body and paint, $260 mechanical and electrical, $285 diagnostics with a one hour minimum credited against an authorized repair, and $95 detail. Materials bill at $55 per paint hour and $5 per body hour with $45 flat hazmat. Parts carry 100 percent markup at $100 or less and 35 percent above that. Tax of 7.75 percent applies to parts and materials only, never labor.

New accounts run on the standard deposit schedule: 50 percent at authorization over $2,000, an additional 25 percent when parts arrive on jobs above $10,000, balance at pickup. Established accounts with history can move to purchase order and net terms. Card payments over $1,000 carry a 3.5 percent surcharge, which on fleet volumes is a reason to pay by check or ACH.

Body and paint labor is posted at $210 per hour. Mechanical and electrical is $260 per hour. Diagnostics run $285 per hour with a one hour minimum that is credited back against an authorized repair. Ranges below reflect jobs we have actually completed.