Five kinds of firm this doesn't work for.

The report works by comparing job types against each other — what a boiler service returns per hour against what a bathroom install returns per hour, across enough of each for the average to mean something. One person doing perhaps two hundred jobs a year spreads those across five or six types, and a type with nine jobs in it has an average that moves by a third if one job overran.

We would still produce a document. It would be arithmetic on numbers too thin to carry it, and the honest version of that report is mostly warnings. You already know which jobs you dislike quoting; at your volume that instinct is better evidence than our averages.

Three is not a hard line and we do not treat it as one — it is where the numbers usually start holding. Below it the same thinness applies: too few jobs per type, one bad month swinging a whole year, and a floor rate built on a headcount small enough that a single person's holiday moves it.

If you are at two and growing, the report is worth more in a year than it is now. Send us your job count by type and we will tell you honestly whether it is enough yet. That costs nothing and we would rather do it than take the fee.

If your price list comes from a franchisor, the report's central output — the rate each job type should carry — is something you are contractually unable to act on. The cost side would still be true and occasionally useful: which work is costing you most per billable hour is worth knowing even when you cannot reprice it.

But most of the value is in the half you cannot use, and we would be charging you full price for it. If your agreement leaves you room on some job types and not others, say so when you enquire and we will tell you whether what is left is worth the fee.

We do not file anything, we are not regulated to advise on tax, and the report is not a set of accounts. It does not reconcile to your ledger, it will not satisfy a lender, and your accountant should not be asked to rely on it.

What it does is the thing your accountant is not engaged to do: split a year of work by job type and cost each one against the hours it consumed. Those are complementary, not competing — the comparison page sets out where each one is the better tool.

The five days are not queue time. They are extraction, classification, the cost build-up, the checks, and a person reading the finished document against your records before it is sent. Compressing that would mean removing the review, and the review is the part that catches what the arithmetic cannot.

So there is no expedited tier at any price. If you are quoting a job on Thursday and want a defensible floor rate by Wednesday, the honest answer is to work it out yourself — the method is published in full, with the arithmetic shown step by step. It will take you an evening and it costs nothing.