Business planner
Is it worth hiring another technician? What happens if someone leaves? Can the team take on more work? Most owners answer these questions on gut feeling today, even though one bad decision can set the company back for months.
RDO's business planner works out from your company's own data what would happen to the team and to profit under different scenarios. It doesn't promise a single number: it shows the likely outcome, and the range the result may fall in.
It starts with a question
Every question brings a ready starting scenario with it, pre-filled with your company's data. Every assumption can be changed, and you can plan up to 24 months ahead.
The planner estimates when a new technician pays off, and how much extra work the team can handle with them.
It models how much work would be missed and how much profit would fall.
It simulates whether the current team can handle higher demand, or whether work starts to pile up.
It estimates what a price increase would do to profit if some customers drop away in the meantime.
It projects how next year might go, together with changes in headcount and prices.
You can build your company's model and then run your own scenarios on it.
How does a plan come together?
The planner works from what RDO already knows from everyday work: who did the job, how long it took, how much travel there was, and what you invoiced for it.
When you create a plan, the technicians, their qualifications, hourly wages, working hours and job categories are already in it. You don’t have to enter them again.
You give every variable of the plan three values: low, typical and high. You don't have to predict exact numbers; the likely value and the two ends are enough. For example, a visit typically takes 60 minutes, but it can be anywhere from 36 to 96.
If you already have recorded jobs in RDO, the planner looks at what actually happened: how long visits took, how many jobs came in, and what they brought in. It puts what past data shows next to your estimate, and you decide which one it calculates with.
From revenue it deducts not only wages but every other cost as well, from contributions through vehicles to overheads, so you see the real profit. You can also set the profit level you don’t want to drop below.
It measures every option against nothing changing. A scenario consists of one or more changes: for example, you hire a new technician, someone leaves, you train a colleague, or you change the number of incoming jobs, working hours, visit lengths, costs or prices. You can compare up to six such scenarios in one plan. You can also work out at what level of demand, price or hours a scenario starts to pay off.
1000 possible futures for every scenario
How does it calculate?
The planner tries every scenario on the same thousand possible futures. So you see the most likely result and the band that 90% of cases fall into, and the difference between scenarios is caused by the decision, not by luck.
This is statistics, not artificial intelligence: the software doesn’t “think”, it calculates.
What you see at the end
At the end of the calculation, you get a short summary (a decision card) for every scenario: whether it pays off, how much profit changes, and how likely you are to be better off.
Example
A fictional service company in Budapest works with five technicians, 40 hours a week. The owner wants to know whether it is worth hiring a sixth from the second month, at HUF 6,500 an hour, with an 80% starting pace and HUF 180,000 in training costs. The planner works through both versions over six months with a thousand runs: with the new technician and without.
The decision card shows three things:
Four views show the details:
A decision card for every scenario: the change in profit and the chance that you are better off.
Required and available hours per qualification. It shows where the bottleneck is.
Revenue, wages, costs, operating and net result, and what drove the change.
Profit and missed work month by month, with an uncertainty band.
If a scenario has a lot of work finished late, the planner tries four steps by itself and shows how much each would improve things. These are not advice, but calculated alternatives.
Reliability
The planner is not a black box. It shows what it learned from, how well it matched the past, and where the limits of what it can claim lie.
Who is it for? The owner or managing director, who decides about money and people. Only administrators can open the planner; technicians cannot see it.
Which plan includes it? The Business planner is part of the paid Basic plan. Pricing and plans
Get to know RDO in a demo
In a 20-minute demo, we go through a plan live: start from a question, compare the options, and decide on solid ground.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. You can build the plan from your own estimates (low, typical and high value), and by starting without a scenario you can put your company's model together yourself. As completed jobs build up, the planner can increasingly compare your estimates with real data.
Yes. The planner can also work out at what level of demand, price or hours a scenario starts to pay off. So you see not only whether a new technician pays off, but also how much work it takes for it to pay off.
