Calibrating from job outcomes

Calibration takes real, finished jobs and works out what your base rate would need to be for those jobs to have hit the crew-hour rate you’re aiming for.

Recording an outcome

There are two ways a finished job ends up in your calibration pool:

From the estimate itself. Once a job in the field app reaches Won or Lost, record its real crew hours (and revenue, if you want it) right there — that outcome is tied back to the tree measurements already on the estimate.
On the Calibration tab. Add a job by hand, or import a batch from a file. Either way you’re providing a service type, a trunk diameter, and the actual crew hours the job took; label, whether it was won, and actual revenue are optional.

Settings → Calibration

This tab is owner-only, same as your rate matrix. Before it can recommend anything, you supply your target crew-hour rate — what your business needs to earn per crew hour to be healthy. That number is deliberately never derived from your own past revenue: pulling it from jobs you may have underpriced would let that underpricing quietly carry forward into a “calibrated” rate that’s still too low. You tell the tool what healthy looks like; it works backward from there.

What the tool does with your jobs

For each job in your pool, it works out what rate-per-inch would have hit your target rate given that job’s actual hours and DBH, then averages those numbers across your jobs — trimming the highest and lowest 10% once you have at least ten, so one outlier job can’t swing the whole recommendation. The result comes with a confidence label based on how many jobs fed it: none (fewer than 5), low (5+), medium (20+), and high (50+). Confidence is a signal about how much to trust the number, not a gate — the tool will compute and let you apply a recommendation from a single job if you ask it to.

You pick which service types’ jobs go into a given run. That’s a filter on which of your recorded jobs count, not a way to calibrate each service separately — see below.

Preview vs. apply

Preview shows you the recommended rate without changing anything. Apply writes it into your rate matrix as a new version, the same as any other rate change — see Your rate matrix for how versioning works. Estimates you’ve already priced keep the rates they were priced with either way.

How many outcomes make it worth running

The tool works with as few jobs as you have, but treat anything below “low” confidence as a hint, not a decision. Once you’re recording outcomes as a matter of routine, medium and high confidence follow naturally — there’s no separate step to reach them beyond logging real jobs as they close.

What to watch out for

Applying always updates the one shared rate that removal and trim both step down from — never your stump rate. Even if you calibrate using only stump job outcomes, the recommended number still gets written to that shared base rate, which stump doesn’t use at all. There’s no way to calibrate stump pricing specifically with this tool today.

Your target rate is an input, not a suggestion the tool makes for you. If you don’t know your real crew-hour cost, calibration will still run — on whatever number you type in.