Loading Service Cost Tracker…
Servicing and repairs across the whole time you have owned a car, reported as a yearly average rather than as the bill that happens to be freshest in your memory.
Three things to a line, in any order: date, what it was for, amount. Dates are YYYY-MM-DD. Lines beginning with # are ignored, so you can keep notes in the log. If an amount contains a comma — as a decimal point or as a thousands separator — separate the columns with | instead, or that comma is read as a column break.
A label only.
Defaults to your first bill.
Add a line for every bill you have paid: the date, what it was for, and what it came to. Nothing is assumed about prices — these are your invoices.
Nothing here is compared against a typical cost, because there is no such thing to compare against. Labour rates differ by a factor of three between a main dealer and an independent garage in the same town, parts differ by more, and a figure invented for the average car would be wrong for yours in a direction you could not guess. What this page does is add up what you have actually paid and divide it by how long you have actually owned it.
Ownership costs arrive in lumps. A cambelt, a clutch, a set of tyres and a failed emissions test can land inside the same twelve months and produce a bill that makes the car look like a mistake, while the three quiet years on either side make the identical car look faultless. People sell perfectly sound vehicles on the strength of one expensive autumn and keep money pits on the strength of a cheap spring, and in both cases the sample size is the problem rather than the car.
Averaging across the whole time you have owned it is the correction. The average tells you what keeping this car has genuinely cost per year of ownership, which is the figure you would need if you were ever going to compare it against replacing it.
The running total answers a different question from the average, and the worst year answers a third. The total is what has left your account since you bought the thing. The average is what a year of this car costs when the lumps are smoothed out. The worst year is the size of the lump you should be able to absorb, which is the number that decides how much of a buffer you need rather than how much you spend.
Showing only the average would flatter a car that has already eaten one enormous bill and hide the fact that another could arrive next spring. Showing only the total punishes long ownership, since a car kept for eight years will always have a bigger number than one kept for two. Neither figure is complete on its own, so both are on the page along with the year-by-year breakdown they came from.
Every calendar year inside your ownership window gets a row, including the ones with no bills at all. A year that cost nothing is a real fact about a car and dropping it would quietly inflate the average, because dividing four bills by the three years that happened to contain them is not the same as dividing them by the five years you have owned it.
The same logic applies at the start. The ownership date matters more than it looks: the months between buying the car and the first invoice are months of successful, cost-free motoring, and they belong in the denominator. Under a year of history there is no average to report at all, only a rate scaled up from a few months, and a first service plus a set of tyres in that window would project to a figure nobody should plan around.
Nothing on this page is compared against what servicing is supposed to cost, because that comparison cannot be made honestly. Labour rates differ by a factor of three between a franchised dealer and an independent garage in the same town, parts differ by more again depending on whether they came from the manufacturer or the aftermarket, and the same job on the same model can be routine on one engine variant and a full day of work on another.
What this does instead is add up the invoices you have actually paid and divide by the time you have actually owned the car. Every figure on the page is yours, which is the only way a number like this means anything.
Keep them out if you want the number to mean servicing and repairs. Those three are largely predictable and vary with how far you drive rather than with the condition of the car, so mixing them in hides the thing you are trying to watch.
Both belong in, since they are unavoidable costs of keeping the vehicle usable and they arrive as lumps in exactly the way the average exists to smooth. Log the test fee and any work needed to pass it as separate lines so you can see which was which.
Three or four begin to be meaningful, because most of the big scheduled items recur on a multi-year cycle and a shorter window either misses them entirely or is dominated by one. Below a year the page reports a projected rate and says so.
Not by itself. Compare it against what the replacement would cost per year, including its depreciation, which is usually the largest single expense of a newer car and never appears on a garage invoice. A car costing more each year can still be the cheaper option.