“About a week” is what a service counter says when nobody has done the division. The queue is a number, daily capacity is a number, and the quotient — rounded up — is the day a customer can actually collect their bike.
96 bikes queued with three techs doing five jobs each is 6.4 days — you promise seven, not five.
The example
Three weeks of the season, each with a queue, the techs on the bench, and how many jobs a tech clears a day.
| A | B | C | D | E | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Week | Jobs queued | Techs | Jobs/tech/day | Days |
| 2 | Spring rush | 46 | 2 | 5 | 5 |
| 3 | Midweek lull | 12 | 2 | 5 | 2 |
| 4 | Holiday week | 96 | 3 | 5 | 7 |
The formula
Daily capacity in the denominator, queue on top:
How it works
Three inputs, one of them easy to inflate:
B2is the queue, counted as tagged bikes on the rack — not open work orders, which include bikes waiting on parts.C2*D2is daily throughput. Four to six standard tune-ups a day per tech is a realistic bench; a shop that counts flat repairs in the same bucket will overstate it badly.- The division gives days as a decimal, which is the honest answer.
ROUNDUP(...,0)makes it a promise. Rounding a 6.4 down to six is how a shop earns a reputation for calling late.
Add the result to today's date for a pickup day, and if the number crosses a week, that is the signal to add bench hours rather than apologise.
Try it: interactive demo
Enter the queue, the techs on the bench, and jobs per tech per day.
Variations
Pickup date
Add the days to today for a date to write on the tag.
Business days only
Skip weekends when the shop is closed Sunday and Monday.
Techs needed for a 3-day promise
Solve the other way to see the staffing a target turnaround requires.
Pitfalls & errors
Jobs per tech per day is not a constant across job types. A full overhaul and a tube swap both count as one job here, so a shop with a lumpy mix should weight the queue in labour hours instead of job count.
Bikes waiting on a back-ordered part are not backlog — they are parked. Counting them makes the promise date worse for everyone still in line.
Watch the parentheses. =ROUNDUP(B2/C2*D2,0) multiplies by jobs per day instead of dividing, and turns a seven-day backlog into 160.
Practice workbook
Frequently asked questions
How many tune-ups can one tech do in a day?
Should I quote the calculated day or pad it?
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