PressureWashingBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Routes

Surfaces, Square Feet and Stories: Reading Job Details Before You Schedule a Pressure Washing Job

An address tells you where a job is. It tells you nothing about how long it will take, which equipment it needs or whether it fits on Tuesday. In pressure washing, that information lives in a handful of job details. When they are on every job, scheduling becomes a matter of reading. When they are missing, it becomes a matter of guessing.

Water Is One Detail of Many

The spigot note in Water Source and Spigot Notes: Scheduling Pressure Washing Jobs Around Where the Hose Hooks Up is one piece of what a crew needs at the curb. The job details are the other big piece, and they matter just as much to whoever builds the schedule.

What the Job Details Are

Every job in PressureWashingBossPro can carry:

• Surfaces: House Wash, Roof Soft Wash, Driveway, Sidewalk, Patio, Deck, Fence, Pool Deck, Gutter Brightening, Storefront, Drive-Thru, Dumpster Pad, Parking Garage, Fleet.
• Square feet of the area being cleaned.
• Stories for house washes and roofs.
• Siding or surface: vinyl, brick, stucco, wood, fiber cement, stone, concrete.
• Method: soft wash, pressure wash, hot water, surface cleaner.
• Access notes: spigot location, gate code, dog, plants to cover, cars to move.

They show under the address on the dispatch board and on the crew's phone in one line, like “House Wash, Driveway · 3,800 sq ft · 2-story · Vinyl · Soft Wash.”

Where the Details Come From

Most details are entered once, at the estimate. When the customer approves, they carry onto the job automatically. The property map can measure square feet and linear feet from the satellite view, so driveways, roofs and fences can have real measurements even when the estimate was done from the office. Estimates can price off those measurements too, which means the person pricing the job and the person scheduling it are working from the same numbers.

For recurring work, the details live on the address and show up every visit. A monthly storefront entered once shows the same surfaces and size every month.

Reading a Day by Its Details

Filter the dispatch board to one rig and one day and read the details down the list. Each one tells you something about the day:

• Surfaces tell you the kind of work and the equipment. A Roof Soft Wash needs a different setup than a Driveway.
• Square feet tells you size. A 600 sq ft driveway and a 2,000 sq ft pool deck are different afternoons.
• Stories tell you about ladders, reach and extra time. A 3-story house wash is slower than a ranch.
• Siding tells you about care. Stucco and painted wood are usually handled more gently than vinyl. Follow the manufacturer's guidance for the surface and the products you use.
• Method tells you which rig. Hot-water jobs go on the rig with the hot-water unit. Surface cleaner jobs go where the surface cleaner is.

Read that way, you can tell in a minute whether the day is light, full or overloaded.

Assigning the Right Rig

If your rigs are set up differently, the method and surfaces are the quickest way to match jobs to trailers. A dumpster pad and gum removal on the hot-water rig. Long driveways and pool decks on the rig with the bigger surface cleaner. Roofs on the rig set up for soft washing. When a job lands on the wrong rig, the details make it obvious before the crew finds out the hard way.

The same goes for crew members. If you have one person who is especially careful on stucco or a roof specialist, the siding and surfaces tell you which days need them. Assign that person to the rig that has those jobs, and the right hands end up on the right houses without anyone having to ask.

Fill In Details on Every Job

The details only help if they are there. A few habits keep them complete:

• Fill them in on every estimate, even quick ones.
• For call-in jobs added straight to the schedule, take thirty seconds to add surfaces and size.
• When importing customers from a CSV file, add details to recurring addresses before the season starts. Imported addresses are placed on the map automatically.
• When a crew notes that a job was bigger than listed, update the address.

Details Make Better Days

Good details lead to days that are sized right, rigs that carry the right equipment and crews who know the job before they step out of the truck. That shows up most clearly on accounts with many locations, covered in Scheduling HOA Common Areas and Multi-Location Commercial Pressure Washing Accounts. For the full set of scheduling tools that use these details, visit the PressureWashingBossPro scheduling software page.