PressureWashingBossPro Blog — Billing & Payments

Cash Flow in the Slow Winter Months: Pressure Washing Billing Habits for the Off-Season

In much of the country, pressure washing has a season. Spring and summer are packed, fall stays busy, and then the cold arrives and the phone goes quiet. Freezing temperatures make residential washing hard or impossible in many areas. The bills, of course, keep coming: the truck payment, insurance, the shop, and whoever you want to keep on payroll. Winter cash flow is mostly decided by what you did with billing the rest of the year.

Fleets and Commercial Help

Billing Fleet Washing: Per-Vehicle Line Items and Monthly Pressure Washing Statements covered one kind of work that can continue in colder months, depending on your climate and setup. Commercial monthly work is the other. This article is about billing habits that carry you through the quiet stretch.

None of this is financial advice. Every company's costs, climate and customers are different. These are practical habits many owners use, and your accountant can help with the rest.

Habit One: Collect Everything Before It Gets Cold

The worst winter cash problem is money you already earned and never collected. A summer invoice that is still open in November is harder to collect than it was in July, and by February the customer may not even remember the job.

In early fall, go through every open invoice. The past-due follow-up in PressureWashingBossPro handles reminders by text and email, but fall is the time for the personal texts and calls on anything older. Ask customers with declined cards to update them in the customer app. Settle the odd disputes. Every dollar collected in October is a dollar you do not have to find in January.

Habit Two: More Customers on Card on File

Card on file with auto-charge on completion means the money for each job arrives the day the work is done. Over a season, that keeps open invoices low, which means there is less to chase when things slow down. Each spring, push a little harder to get new customers on card on file at sign-up. The website sign-up form captures a card as part of signing up, which makes it the default rather than an extra request. See Collecting the Card at Sign-Up: Setting Up Pressure Washing Billing Before the First Wash.

Habit Three: Build Commercial Monthly Work

Commercial monthly work is steadier than residential. Storefronts, drive-thrus and dumpster pads set to 30 days between visits come due every month, and where your climate allows, some of that work continues into the colder months on warmer days. Even when winter visits drop off, the clients and the relationships stay in place for spring.

Billing for this work is predictable too. Clients set to Monthly get one statement each month covering every location. If a good share of your revenue comes from accounts like that, the slow season looks a lot less slow.

Habit Four: Sell Yearly Plans in the Fall

Yearly house wash customers come due every 365 days. Customers who sign up for a yearly plan in the fall, when their house was just washed, are customers whose spring work is already on the books. They show up on the Waiting List when due, and the office does not have to market to them again.

A fall message to recent one-time customers offering a yearly plan, with a link to sign up and a card captured, is one of the most useful things you can send before winter. The customer app also lets existing customers sign up for services and pricing on their own.

Habit Five: Use Winter for Billing Housekeeping

The quiet months are the best time to fix things that are hard to fix in June:

• Update prices. Review your service list and the prices on recurring addresses, and tell customers before spring.
• Clean up client records. Tidy up duplicate entries, fix addresses and make sure commercial clients have every location attached.
• Review the year. Use the billing reports to see what was billed, what was paid and what is still open. A month-end habit makes this easy; see The Month-End Billing Review: A Pressure Washing Owner's Half-Hour Checklist.
• Check sales tax setup with your accountant if anything changed.
• Remind yearly customers to check the card on file before spring.

Plan Spring Before It Arrives

The first warm weeks of spring are when cash comes back. The faster you can get from the first warm day to a full schedule, the shorter the gap. Use the slow months to send estimate follow-ups to people who asked for quotes in the fall, and to line up yearly customers whose visits will come due early in the season. The Waiting List shows what is coming due, so the office can build the first routes before the phone starts ringing.

Winter Starts in Summer

A good winter is built during the busy months: invoices collected promptly, more customers on card on file, commercial monthly accounts in place and yearly plans sold in the fall. PressureWashingBossPro handles the billing pieces so the off-season is about planning, not chasing. For the rest of billing, see the pressure washing invoicing software page.