PressureWashingBossPro Blog — Billing & Payments

Billing Reports for Pressure Washing Companies: What to Look At and Why

Most pressure washing owners know roughly how the business is doing. They know when the schedule is full, when the phone is quiet and when the bank account feels tight. Billing reports turn that rough feeling into numbers you can act on. You do not need to become an accountant to use them. You just need to know which few questions to ask.

Reports Make the Review Quick

The Month-End Billing Review: A Pressure Washing Owner's Half-Hour Checklist laid out a monthly routine. Reports are what keep that routine to half an hour instead of an afternoon spent opening jobs one at a time.

Because PressureWashingBossPro creates invoices from completed jobs and records payments against them, the reports are built from the same records the crew and office use every day. Nobody has to export a spreadsheet and reconcile it against a notebook.

Question One: What Did We Bill?

Start with what was invoiced for the period. This is the work you did and charged for, whether or not it has been paid yet. Look at it month by month through the season. You will see the spring ramp, the summer peak and the fall slowdown, and you will see whether this year is running ahead of or behind last year.

It is also worth splitting residential from commercial in your head. Residential billing swings with the season. Commercial monthly billing is steadier. If commercial makes up more of the total each year, your slow months are getting easier.

Question Two: What Did We Collect?

Billed and collected are not the same number. The gap between them is money you earned and do not have yet. In a healthy month, most of what was billed is already paid, thanks to cards on file charged at completion and customers paying online from the customer app.

If collected lags well behind billed, find out why. Usually it is one of three things: too few customers on card on file, commercial statements on slow payment cycles, or a pile of declined cards that nobody followed up on.

Question Three: What Is Still Open?

Open invoices are the most actionable number in billing. Look at them oldest first. Recent ones are usually handled by past-due follow-up, which sends reminders by text and email. Older ones need a person. Very old ones need a decision about whether to keep doing work for that customer.

The routine for open invoices is covered in Past-Due Pressure Washing Invoices: A Follow-Up Routine That Gets Paid Without Burning Bridges.

Question Four: Who Pays Slowly?

Over a few months, you will notice the same names on the open list. Some are commercial accounts with long payment cycles, which is normal and something to plan around. Some are residential customers who always pay eventually but never on time. Those are good candidates for a conversation about card on file.

Tags and custom fields on client records help here. If you tag customers by type — residential, storefront, restaurant, HOA, fleet — it becomes easier to see which kinds of customers pay quickly and which do not.

Question Five: What Sells?

Because invoice lines come from your service list, they tell you what you are actually selling. How much of your residential work is house washes versus driveways? Are customers adding gutter brightening? Is the roof soft wash worth the setup? Looking at what you invoiced by service helps you decide what to promote, what to bundle and what to reprice.

Sales Tax and Your Accountant

Invoices include sales tax on their own line, which makes it much easier to see what you collected for tax purposes. Your accountant will want to see that along with billing and payments for the period. Having it all in one place saves them time and you money. As always, ask your accountant how sales tax applies to your services; see Sales Tax on Pressure Washing Invoices: Setting It Up and Knowing When to Ask an Accountant.

Do Not Overdo It

It is easy to spend more time on reports than on running the business. For most one- and two-rig companies, five questions once a month is plenty: billed, collected, open, slow payers and what sells. Write the answers down so you can compare month to month. That alone puts you ahead of owners running on gut feel.

Numbers You Can Act On

Billing reports are useful only when they lead to something: a follow-up call, a push for card on file, a price change, a decision to stop working for a customer who never pays. PressureWashingBossPro builds reports from the same jobs, invoices and payments your company already runs on. For the rest of billing, see the pressure washing invoicing software page.