How to price phone repairs without guessing

• Part cost is the floor, not the price.
• Bench time includes diagnosis, the repair, testing and the handover.
• Build in the failure rate — dead boards and parts that arrive faulty.
• Review quarterly; part prices move constantly.

Start with what the job actually costs you

Take a screen replacement. The part is what you paid, including postage and whatever proportion of parts arrive unusable. The labour is not just the twenty minutes at the bench — it is booking the job in, diagnosis, the repair, testing, and the conversation at collection.

If a technician on £13 an hour spends 45 minutes across all of that, the labour cost is around £10 before any overhead. That is a cost, not a price.

Add the jobs that do not go to plan

A proportion of repairs lose money: the board turns out to be dead, the replacement part is faulty, the customer returns it and you redo it. If one job in twenty ends that way, every successful job needs to carry a share of it.

This is the number most shops never calculate, and it is usually the difference between a healthy margin and a thin one. You can only work it out if failed jobs are recorded rather than quietly written off.

Then look at the market

Now compare with local pricing. If your number is well above the going rate, the question is whether you can justify it — a warranty, a same-day turnaround, genuine parts — or whether your costs are too high.

If your number is below the going rate, do not simply match the market. Ask why, because it is often because you have not counted something.

Knowing your real numbers

All of this needs actual figures: what you paid for parts, how long jobs take, how many come back. Guessing at those produces a confident price built on nothing.

Mobile POS records parts consumed against each repair job and tracks jobs through the bench, so the margin on repair work is visible per job and per period rather than estimated at year end.