CarpetBossPro Blog — Estimates & Quotes

Building Carpet Cleaning Quotes From Your Own Service List

Ask two techs at the same company what a three-room clean costs and you sometimes get two answers. One remembers last year's price, one rounds up for the hallway, and the owner quotes something else entirely on the phone. The fix is not a better memory. It is a service list: one place where every service you sell has a name and a price, and every quote is built from it.

The Service List Is Where Quotes Come From

The full flow from first call to scheduled job is laid out in Carpet Cleaning Estimate Software: The Complete Guide to Quoting, Approval and Turning Quotes Into Jobs. This guide covers the first step, the list itself.

In CarpetBossPro, an estimate is a set of services picked from your list. You choose “Carpet cleaning, per room,” enter three, add “Hallway,” add “Stairs,” and the estimate totals it. Because the prices live on the list and not in anyone's head, the same job costs the same whether the owner, the office manager or a new hire builds the quote.

What Belongs on a Carpet Cleaning Service List

Start with what you actually sell, not what you might sell someday. Most residential carpet cleaners end up with something like this:

• Carpet per room and, if you use one, a minimum charge.
• Whole-house package as a flat price.
• Hallway and stairs, by the step or the flight.
• Upholstery: sofa, loveseat, chair, sectional.
• Area rug, mattress, tile & grout.
• Add-ons: pet odor treatment, stain protector, deodorizer, spot removal.
• Move-out cleaning for landlords and office maintenance for commercial accounts.

Name each service the way a customer would read it. “Stain Protector — per room” is clearer on an estimate than “SP-R.” The customer sees these names when they approve, so plain names save phone calls.

Choose How Each Service Is Priced

Not everything is priced the same way, and the list should reflect that. A sofa is a flat price. A room is a price per room. A large open basement might be a price per square foot. Stairs might be a price per step.

CarpetBossPro lets services be priced off the property's measurements: square feet, linear feet or number of rooms. If a home has 1,200 carpeted square feet on file and your basement or commercial service is priced per square foot, the estimate does the multiplication. If you price per room, the room count does the work. Pick the method that matches how you think about the job, then let the list apply it every time. The trade-offs are covered in Per Room or Per Square Foot: Choosing How to Price Carpet Cleaning.

Write the Rules Into the Service Names

A service list is also a policy document. If a room is anything up to a certain size, say so in the description. If stairs are priced per flight up to a set number of steps, say that. If the whole-house package covers a certain number of rooms plus one hallway, write it in.

Policies in descriptions do two jobs. They remind whoever is quoting what the price includes, and they show the customer what they are buying. When a customer later asks why the bonus room was charged as two rooms, the answer is on the estimate they approved.

Keep the descriptions short. One line per service is plenty. Long paragraphs on a quote get skipped.

Keep Add-Ons Separate

It is tempting to roll pet odor treatment or protector into the room price and call it a premium clean. Most owners find it works better as separate lines. The customer sees what each extra costs and can say yes or no to each one, and the tech knows exactly which rooms get what.

Separate lines matter on the cleaning day too. In CarpetBossPro, the carpet cleaning checklist on the tech app shows pet odor treatment, stain protector and deodorizer only when they are on the job. If the protector is a line on the estimate, it is a step on the checklist. If it is buried in a package name, nobody can be sure.

Review the List Once a Year

Costs change. Fuel, solution, wages and van payments all move. Pick one time a year, such as the slow weeks after the holidays, to look at every price on the list and decide whether it still makes sense. Changing a price on the list changes it for every new estimate going forward, so there is no hunting through old quote sheets.

While you are there, remove services nobody buys and add the ones you keep writing in by hand. If three estimates in a month had a custom line for “pet urine sub-floor check,” maybe that belongs on the list with a set price.

One List, Every Quote

Once the list is set up, quoting gets faster and more consistent. The office builds estimates from it, the customer approves them online, and the approved estimate becomes the scheduled job with the same services and prices. The invoice at completion uses the same line items, so the quote, the job and the bill all agree.

To see how the service list fits with online approval, templates and follow-ups, visit the CarpetBossPro carpet cleaning estimate software page.