Revenue per stop tells you about pricing. Revenue per service hour tells you about the business.
Why it matters
Two accounts at $90 a visit are not equal if one takes 25 minutes and sits in a cluster while the other takes 25 minutes and sits forty minutes away. Per stop, they are identical. Per hour, one earns roughly twice the other. Every route decision — which accounts to take, where to grow, what to charge for distance — depends on telling them apart.
How you notice it slipping
Revenue grows while margin does not. Rising stop counts are celebrated without anyone checking what happened to the hours. The accounts furthest from the depot are never priced differently from the ones next door.
What to do
It is also the number that makes a distance surcharge arguable rather than awkward. An account whose revenue per service hour sits a third below the rest of the book is not a difficult customer; it is a customer whose geography was never priced.
Calculate it per route and per territory, with drive time included in the denominator. Then sort. The bottom of that list is rarely a pricing failure on its own — it is usually geography that was never priced, and the fix is either a different price or a different place in the week.