The £200,000 a Year Hiding in Your Field Service Business

Take a typical UK field service business — six engineers, six vans, around £500k in annual revenue. The leaks are rarely huge on their own. Stacked together, they're the difference between a tough year and a great one.

We've written one deep-dive for each leak with the maths. Here's the headline number:

Where the money is hiding

• Poor stock control & supply runs — ~£83,000/year (6 engineers × 1 supply run/day)
• Missed calls — ~£18,700/year (2 saved calls/week at £180 avg)
• Route optimisation — ~£49,000/year (Fuel + 1 extra job/van/week)
• Late invoicing — ~£30,000 cash freed (DSO 35 → 12 days)
• Return visits — ~£43,200/year (1 avoided return/engineer/week)
• No-shows — ~£23,400/year (3 prevented no-shows/week)

The total

Recurring annual recovery: ~£217,000. Plus a one-off working-capital release of around £30,000 from faster invoicing and £3,000–£6,000 from clearing dead van stock.

Even if your business is half the size, or you only get half of each number, you're still looking at a Tryoup payback measured in weeks, not years.

The cost of answering the phone

One leak that rarely gets counted is call handling itself — receptionist hours, per-call answering fees and engineers stopping work to pick up. Cutting call centre costs with an AI voice agent walks through how to put a number on it using your own call report.

Industries we work with

The same maths plays out across locksmiths, plumbers, electricians, cleaning firms, pest control and heating engineers. The trade changes; the leaks don't.