StashGrade for exterior cleaning
Pressure washing, soft wash, windows: know what each crew-day keeps.
Pressure washing, drone and soft washing, window cleaning. Most exterior cleaning P&Ls put a one-time driveway, a roof soft wash and a quarterly commercial window route in the same income line, while chemicals, fuel and rained-out days eat the difference. StashGrade reads the split from your books and shows what a job, a crew-day and a maintenance contract actually earn. QuickBooks, CSV, or QBO export all work.
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Where exterior cleaning contractors leak money
Recurring contracts carrying one-time pricing habits
A quarterly commercial window route or an annual house-wash plan is the steadiest revenue in the business, and it is usually priced once and never again. Chemical, fuel and wage costs move every season; the contract price does not. Across fifty maintenance accounts, a few dollars of drift per visit is a full crew-day of margin gone every month. The books show it as a recurring line that keeps earning less.
Chemical and consumable cost nobody tracks per job
Sodium hypochlorite, surfactants, degreaser, squeegee rubber, pads. Bought by the drum, expensed when the invoice lands, never tied to the job that used it. A roof soft wash can burn three times the chemical of a house wash at the same ticket. When chemicals climb from 4% of revenue toward 8% and pricing stays flat, the leak is in the mix of work, and the P&L is the only place it shows.
Crews paid for eight hours, billing for five
Setup, fill-ups, drive time between stops, waiting on a property manager, a second trip for the forgotten gate code. A two-person crew that completes three jobs on a good day and one on a bad one has the same payroll both days. Revenue per crew-day is the number that tells you whether the route is tight or the truck is the most expensive thing you own.
Weather downtime that only the overhead line remembers
Rain, wind over a drone's limit, freezing temperatures. A season can lose twenty working days and the payroll, truck payments and software bills arrive anyway. Busy-month pricing has to carry the quiet months. The books show whether it does, and which month the margin actually went negative.
Drone versus ladder labor priced the same
A drone soft wash on a three-story building replaces a lift rental, a second tech and a day of ladder work. If the quote is still built on the ladder-crew model, you are either leaving the savings on the table or not charging enough to pay for the drone. Labor as a share of revenue, by job type, is how you see which it is.
What the readout looks like
Margin by service type on an illustrative exterior cleaning P&L (estimated from public sources, not yet a customer readout):
| Segment | Gross margin | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Recurring commercial window route | 62% | labor only, route density drives it |
| Residential house soft wash | 58% | |
| Driveway / flatwork pressure washing | 51% | |
| Roof soft wash | 46% | chemical-heavy, slower setup |
| Multi-story commercial (lift or drone) | 38% | equipment and travel compress margin |
Sample data from a seeded demo company.
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