More paperwork than wrench time

A tech you pay forty dollars an hour spent more of this week on paperwork than on a customer’s job.

That is not a feeling. It is the math from Salesforce’s 2025 State of Service Report, a double-anonymous survey of 6,500 service professionals and decision makers run from April through June 2025. Technicians spend roughly thirty percent of their working hours on admin and roughly twenty-nine percent on actually delivering service. The other forty percent is the drive, the breaks, the parts pickup, and everything else you can’t put on an invoice.

Read that twice. The person you hired to turn wrenches turned them less than a third of the time he was on the clock.

The same report adds two numbers worth sitting with. The average tech wastes more than seven hours a week on admin. Sixty-six percent report burnout at least once a month. Eighty-one percent work overtime at least once a month, just to dig out.

You already know this part. You’ve seen a guy come back to the shop at 5:30 and sit in the cab another forty minutes to close out the day.

The old way made sense for a long time. Field service software was a desktop tool dropped onto a phone. Same forms. Same dropdowns. Same click count. A tech finishing a job in a customer’s driveway is filling in the same paperwork an office clerk would, just standing up, holding a phone, with the next customer waiting. Of course it eats a third of the day.

Drive time is a cousin of the same pain. A three-tech plumbing crew in Sacramento counted ninety minutes of windshield time a day across the crew. One whole service call lost, every day, because nobody thought about the order of the stops. The off-the-shelf route planners that work for delivery drivers can’t handle “assign this customer to this tech and slot it where it fits.” So the owner stops opening them.

The software most shops use today does not push back on any of this. It stores the data. It generates the form. It still asks the tech to fill the same fields twice. Once on the job, once at the truck. When the day ends late, the answer is to send him home and start over tomorrow.

That gap is the reason we built Nyva.

What if the invoice drafted itself while the tech was washing his hands? What if photos filed against the right customer without a tap? What if the day’s stops arrived in the dispatch board overnight, already in the right order, and quietly re-sorted themselves when somebody canceled at two?

None of that is a feature list. It’s just what the rest of the day should look like.

The admin slice is bigger than the actual service slice. That’s the part you can’t bill.

Here is the number to leave with. Every owner running a 1 to 5 person crew is already paying for the forty percent of the day the trucks are not on a job. The question is whether you’re paying for them to be on a screen or on a customer’s roof.

If a tech in your shop did seven hours less admin this week, what would you have asked him to do instead? Tell me at hello@nyva.app or take a look at nyva.app.