PressureWashingBossPro Blog — Quotes & Estimates

Estimate Templates for Pressure Washing: Quoting Your Common Jobs in a Few Clicks

Look back at the last fifty quotes your company sent and you will notice something: most of them are the same handful of jobs. A house wash. A house wash and a driveway. A driveway and walks. A roof. A monthly storefront. If you are building each of those from a blank page every time, you are doing the same work over and over.

Why Templates Matter

Speed is half of winning quotes, and follow-up is the other half, which is covered in Estimate Follow-Up Emails That Bring Pressure Washing Quotes Back to Life. Templates are the speed part.

An estimate template is a saved starting point: the usual line items, the usual notes and the usual job details for a type of job. Pick the template, adjust for this particular property, and send. In PressureWashingBossPro, estimate templates and packages let you save your common combinations and reuse them in a few clicks.

Templates to Build First

Start with what you quote most. For a typical residential company, that might be:

• House Wash — the House Wash line, method set to soft wash, a note about plants and windows.
• House + Driveway — House Wash plus Driveway & Walks, with surface cleaner on the flatwork.
• Driveway & Walks — the flatwork line with your minimum note.
• Roof Soft Wash — the roof line, soft wash method, notes about plants below and what the price is based on.
• Backyard — patio, deck and fence.

For commercial work, add templates for Storefront Monthly, Drive-Thru and Dumpster Pad, with notes about after-hours access and recurring schedules.

What to Put in a Template

A good template has more than line items:

• The services from your service list, so prices come in automatically.
• The method that usually applies, like soft wash on siding or surface cleaner on concrete.
• Standard notes, like “Price based on satellite measurements. We will confirm any change on site before starting.”
• Optional extras, like gutter brightening on a house wash template, so they get offered every time.

Leave the property-specific parts open: the square feet, stories, siding and access notes. Those change every time and should come from the measurements and the questions you asked.

Templates Plus Measurements

Templates do not mean one price for every house. The square-foot lines still price from the property's measurements, so a House + Driveway template on a big lot comes out higher than the same template on a small one. You get the speed of a template and the accuracy of a measured quote.

A typical workflow looks like this: trace the driveway and walks on the satellite map, pick the House + Driveway template, set the stories and siding, add the access notes, and send. What used to take twenty minutes takes a few.

It also makes quoting from a phone realistic. An owner standing in a customer's yard after finishing a job next door can pull up the property, trace the driveway, pick the template and send the estimate before getting back in the truck. The neighbor who walked over to ask “how much for mine?” has a real quote in their inbox before the rig leaves the street, which is about the best timing a quote can have.

Templates are also where your best wording lives. If you found a way to describe soft washing that stops customers from worrying about their plants, or a note about oil stains that heads off complaints, put it in the template so every quote benefits from it.

Consistency Across the Office

Templates also solve a problem that shows up as soon as more than one person quotes. Without them, the owner quotes one way and the office manager quotes another. One mentions gutter brightening, the other forgets. One adds the “confirm on site” note, the other does not. Customers comparing notes with neighbors see the difference.

With templates, everyone starts from the same place. The wording is the same, the extras are offered the same way and the notes protect you the same way. New office help can quote confidently on their first day.

Keep Templates Current

Templates drift. Review them at the start of each season:

• Are the services and notes still right?
• Are there templates nobody uses? Remove them.
• Is there a combination you keep building by hand? Make it a template.
• Do the notes still match how you actually work?

When you change a rate on your service list, open each template that uses it and make sure the quote still reads the way you want. For more on bundles, see House and Driveway Packages: Bundling Services on a Pressure Washing Estimate. To see how templates fit with measuring, approval and scheduling, visit the PressureWashingBossPro pressure washing estimate software page.