Technician commissions without manual calculation disputes.

Technician commissions are one of the most common sources of conflict in a repair shop. Calculated by hand at month-end, remembered differently, and hard to prove when someone feels shorted. A single wrong calculation is enough to break the trust of your best technician.

Automan calculates commissions from recorded work, not from memory, and the rules have four dimensions you can use at the same time.

The rule attaches to the person, not to the shop

“Profit sharing” usually means one percentage column applied evenly to everybody and every job. Here it is built the way pay schemes are actually built:

• Per technician. The rule belongs to the individual. Your board-level specialist and your first-year apprentice can sit on different terms without a second shop, a second service list, or a spreadsheet on the side.
• Labour and parts kept apart. Each has its own rule. You can pay generously on labour — that is the skill — and modestly on a part that was simply fitted. For parts, the basis can be the selling price or the margin over cost.
• Percentage or flat rate. Percentages are fairer where ticket values swing. A flat rate is fairer where the time barely varies whatever the invoice says: an oil change, a wheel alignment, a charging-port swap. You are not forced to pick one shape for everything.
• An exception for one job, without rebuilding the rest. The general rule keeps running for the bulk of the work; a job that is genuinely a different class gets its own line. Both are live at once, so a single awkward job never becomes a shop-wide policy change.

For example: a technician earns 30% of the margin generally, but a screen replacement carries a flat Rp 20,000. Nothing about that needs recalculating by hand at month-end.

This matters because pay schemes are rarely designed on paper — they accumulate. A shop starts with a flat percentage, adds an exception for the fiddly jobs, then another for the senior who does board-level work, and within two years the policy lives in the owner’s head. Software that supports only one shape forces you to abandon a scheme your team already accepts.

Configure percentage or fixed commissions per service, then inspect results, deductions, payments, journals, and settlement status. (App UI shown in Indonesian.)

Worked example: an electronics counter

A customer pays Rp 800,000 for a laptop screen replacement — Rp 500,000 for the LCD itself and Rp 300,000 for the labour. Your cost on that LCD was Rp 400,000. Shop policy: 30% of the service value, plus 10% of the profit on parts.

1. Service commission: 30% of Rp 300,000 = Rp 90,000
2. Parts profit: Rp 500,000 − Rp 400,000 = Rp 100,000
3. Parts commission: 10% of Rp 100,000 = Rp 10,000

The technician has earned Rp 100,000 on that unit, and the figure appears the moment the job status is set to finished. Nobody adds it up later.

Worked example: an auto workshop

Same engine, different trade. A car comes in for a brake service and the customer pays Rp 600,000 — Rp 250,000 in labour and Rp 350,000 for brake pads that cost you Rp 260,000. Policy: 30% of the service value plus 10% of parts profit.

1. Service commission: 30% of Rp 250,000 = Rp 75,000
2. Parts profit: Rp 350,000 − Rp 260,000 = Rp 90,000
3. Parts commission: 10% of Rp 90,000 = Rp 9,000

Rp 84,000 for that visit, calculated the same way as the counter example above. What differs between the two trades is not the arithmetic — it is how the work arrives.

A workshop visit is usually several jobs, not one. A single vehicle can bring a scheduled service, an oil and filter change, and brake work in one booking, and each of those can carry its own rule. Typical schemes shops configure:

A motorcycle workshop follows the same pattern with its own catalogue — scheduled service, oil change, CVT service, brake service, electrical repair — and the same mix of percentages and flat rates applies.

The app calls them Mechanics, because that is what they are

This is not a wording choice we made on this page. Choose a vehicle business type at setup and Technician appears as Mechanic throughout the app — on the commission settings screen, in the job list, and on the payday slip. Choose an electronics type and the same fields read the way a counter reads them.

It sounds cosmetic until you hand a slip to someone. A document that calls a mechanic a “technician” and a brake job a “repair unit service” tells everyone in the building that the software was built for somebody else’s trade, and it invites exactly the sort of squinting you were trying to eliminate.

Calculated from data, not memory

Because every job is recorded in the job records inside the repair workflow, commissions form automatically from what was actually done. No more “as I recall,” no more error-prone manual tallies. When a technician asks “why is it this much?”, the answer is in the data — not in an argument.

Each figure traces back to a specific job: the ticket number, the date, the services performed, and the parts consumed. Once a unit has been handed back, its work history is locked, so the record that a commission rests on cannot quietly change afterwards. That single property is what turns payday from a negotiation into a hand-over.

It also changes the direction of trust. Owners often expect that showing the maths invites more scrutiny. In practice it ends it — people argue with a number that appeared from nowhere, and rarely with one they can follow line by line.

Rules for the jobs that deserve their own rate

Every trade has work that does not fit the standard percentage. In electronics it is board-level repair — IC work on a mainboard, or recovering a water-damaged device — where the skill gap between a junior and a senior is enormous and a flat percentage undervalues one of them. In a workshop it is diagnostic time: the hour spent finding an intermittent electrical fault produces very little invoice value and a great deal of expertise.

Per-item rules exist for exactly these cases. If your standard service commission is 20%, a specific job can carry a fixed Rp 100,000 instead, or a higher percentage, without disturbing anything else. That is how you build an incentive that reflects difficulty rather than ticket size — and how you stop your most capable people quietly avoiding the hardest work.

Payroll connected to the books

Salaries and commissions aren’t a separate note. Once calculated, both are recorded as an expense in accounting, so your profit and loss already reflects labour cost without anyone typing the same figure twice. The owner sees real profit — after commissions, not before.

That connection is what makes a month’s numbers usable. A shop that tracks commissions in a spreadsheet and books “salaries” as one lump figure at the end of the month can tell you its revenue but not its margin, because the largest variable cost in a repair business is attached to the jobs, not to the calendar. When labour posts with the work, gross margin per job stops being an estimate.

What month-end looks like afterwards

The week before payday is the tax a manual system charges you. Sorting through job sheets, working out who did what, chasing the one with unreadable handwriting, then reconciling your total against the tally a technician kept privately in a pocket notebook — and finding they disagree.

With commissions forming as the work is recorded, that week goes away. What remains is a review: open the period, read the figures, check anything that looks unusual, and settle. The disagreements that used to surface on payday now surface on the day of the job, when the facts are still fresh and the fix is a correction rather than an argument.

Why this keeps your team solid

A technician who feels fairly counted stays; one who feels shortchanged leaves — often to a competitor. With transparent, provable profit-sharing, you remove one of the biggest reasons technicians quit. This isn’t just a payroll feature — it’s how you protect a repair shop’s most valuable asset: the people who can actually do the work.

In a workshop the cost of losing someone is often higher still, because a customer who trusts one mechanic tends to follow that mechanic out of the door. Terms are only half of what keeps people; the other half is whether they believe the numbers.

One honest boundary

Automan’s payroll calculates commissions and salaries and posts them to your books. It is not a statutory payroll filing tool: it does not compute income tax withholding, social-security contributions, or year-end returns for any particular country. If your jurisdiction requires those, they stay with your accountant or your local payroll provider — Automan gives them clean, itemised labour figures to work from rather than replacing them.

Pricing is in Indonesian Rupiah, Lite at Rp 0 and Pro at Rp 15,000 per month, and support runs in Bahasa Indonesia. Worth knowing before you build a pay scheme on top of it.

Stop rebuilding the same spreadsheet every month

Manual commission calculation is a habit, and an expensive one — it costs you the last week of every month and buys you an argument. The Lite plan is free with no card required, so you can configure your real scheme, run one real job through it, and see whether the number matches what you would have paid by hand.

Start from the button above, or walk through the repair workflow demo to see how a completed job turns into a commission line and then into an expense in the books.