PressureWashingBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Routes

Booking Roofs and Big Houses Next to Quick Flatwork: Sizing a Pressure Washing Day

Counting stops is the most common way to schedule and the least useful way in pressure washing. Five stops can be a light day or an impossible one. It depends entirely on what those stops are. A good schedule is built on job size, not job count, and that means knowing how big each job is before it lands on a day.

The Rush Makes This Matter

The spring scramble in Scheduling the Spring Rush Without Burying Your Pressure Washing Rig is where poorly sized days hurt the most. When every day is full, there is no room to absorb a job that took twice as long as expected. Sizing days right in the first place is what keeps a busy week from becoming a late week.

Long Jobs and Quick Jobs

Every operator has their own sense of timing, but most sort work into two rough groups:

• Long jobs: roof soft washes, large or 2- and 3-story house washes, stucco and brick that need extra care, big decks, long fence lines, parking garages, HOA common areas with several amenities.
• Quick jobs: single driveways, front walks, small patios, storefront sidewalks, dumpster pads, a single fence section, gutter brightening on a small house.

A typical full day for one rig might be one long job and a few quick ones, or two medium house washes, or a long string of quick commercial stops. What it should rarely be is two long jobs plus a pile of quick ones.

Let the Job Details Tell You

In PressureWashingBossPro, every job shows its details under the address: surfaces, square feet, stories, siding or surface, and method. For example: “House Wash, Driveway · 3,800 sq ft · 2-story · Vinyl · Soft Wash.” Those details come from the estimate, so whoever priced the job already did the sizing work.

When you filter the dispatch board to one rig and one day, you can read the job sizes straight down the list. If the day shows a 2,400 sq ft roof, a 2-story stucco house and three driveways, you know before anyone hitches the trailer that it is too much.

Measurements help too. The property map can measure square feet and linear feet from the satellite view, so driveways, roofs and fences have real numbers attached. That makes it much easier to compare one job to another. Reading these details is covered in Surfaces, Square Feet and Stories: Reading Job Details Before You Schedule a Pressure Washing Job.

Where to Put the Long Job

Operators disagree on whether the long job goes first or last, and both have good reasons:

• Long job first. The crew is fresh, the day is cool, and if the job runs over, the quick jobs after it can slide to the next day without breaking a promise. Many soft wash operators also prefer to work roofs and siding before the sun heats them up.
• Quick jobs first. A few fast wins get the day moving, and the long job at the end can run into the evening if needed without making anyone else wait.

Whichever you prefer, auto-route the day from the shop, then move the long job by hand to where you want it. The crew's phone shows that order.

Use Quick Jobs as Fillers

Quick flatwork is the most flexible work you have. A driveway near a roof job can go on the same day if the roof finishes early, or move to tomorrow if it does not. Some owners keep a short list of nearby quick jobs for each long-job day, so the crew always has something to do if they finish early.

Crew GPS on the office map shows where each rig is. If a crew taps Complete on the long job early, you can see it and add a nearby driveway to their day. The new stop shows on their phone in the order you set.

Book Long Jobs With Room Around Them

Roofs and big houses are the jobs most likely to run long: heavier growth than expected, plants that need extra protection, a ladder setup that takes longer than planned. Do not put a hard-timed stop right after one. A drive-thru that must be done by 6am should never be scheduled after a roof.

Long jobs are also the ones most affected by weather. If the week has one day with a rain chance, put the quick flatwork there and keep the roof for a clear day.

Learn From Your Own Days

The best guide to sizing is your own history. Notice which types of jobs routinely run long for your crew and which run short. Adjust how many you put on a day. Over a season, your sense of a full day gets sharper, and the job details on the board make it easy to apply. For the other scheduling tools that support this, visit the pressure washing scheduling software page.