Excel Invoice Template for Pressure Washing
Pressure washing looks like the simplest trade to price and is one of the easiest to price badly. Every job is surfaces and time, the equipment is the same all day, and the customer sees one truck and one person. But a driveway and a roof are not the same job even when they take the same three hours, because one of them is mostly water and the other one is mostly chemical — and if your invoice does not separate them, you will never notice which half of your day is actually paying.
What a pressure washing invoice needs that a generic template does not
Surfaces are priced differently, and they need to be listed separately. A house wash, a driveway, a roof, a pool cage, and a fence are five different rates, five different methods, and five different amounts of time. Bundling them into “exterior cleaning — $1,200” makes the number look arbitrary to the customer and makes it impossible for you to see which surfaces are worth quoting. Itemizing by surface is also how you upsell: the customer who only asked about the driveway sees what else you do while they are reading the quote.
Soft wash and pressure wash are not the same service. A shingle roof gets a low-pressure chemical application, not 3,000 PSI, and telling the two apart on the invoice protects you. It shows the customer you knew the difference, it documents what method was used if anything goes wrong later, and it explains why the roof line costs more than the square footage suggests it should.
Chemical is a real cost and it varies wildly by job. This is the one that quietly decides whether a route is profitable. Rinsing a concrete driveway is time and fuel. Soft washing a roof or a north-facing wall full of algae is time, fuel, and a meaningful amount of sodium hypochlorite and surfactant. Same crew, same hours, very different cost per job — and nothing on a customer-facing invoice tells you that.
Three kinds of pressure washing work, three different documents
Residential one-time
Driveways, house washes, decks, patios, fences, roofs. Usually quoted from the curb or from photos, often the same day the customer calls. The quote needs to be specific about which surfaces are included, because “wash the outside of my house” means something different to every homeowner, and the argument about whether the fence was included is not one you want after the fact.
Recurring commercial
Restaurant dumpster pads and drive-thrus, storefront sidewalks, gas station canopies and flatwork, apartment breezeways, HOA common areas. Contracted monthly or quarterly, billed against a purchase order, and paid on terms. The margin per visit is thinner than residential but the revenue is scheduled, which makes it the part of the business worth measuring most carefully.
Post-construction and specialty
New-build cleanup, rust and battery-acid stain removal, oil stain treatment, graffiti removal, fleet washing, paint prep. These are priced individually and often involve chemicals or time well beyond a standard wash. They are also where a quote given from a photograph gets expensive, because a rust stain that will not come out is still hours of your day.
Line items pressure washing companies actually bill
- Residential surfaces — house wash by story and square footage, driveway and walkway by square foot, patio and lanai, deck cleaning and brightening, fence by linear foot, pool cage or screen enclosure
- Roof — shingle soft wash, tile roof soft wash, algae and lichen treatment, gutter face brightening, gutter interior cleanout
- Commercial — storefront sidewalk by square foot, dumpster pad, drive-thru lane, gas station canopy and flatwork, breezeway and stairwell, parking garage
- Specialty treatment — rust and fertilizer stain removal, oil and grease stain treatment, gum removal, graffiti removal, post-construction cleanup
- Contracts and scheduling — monthly or quarterly commercial contract, after-hours or overnight premium, minimum service charge, trip charge outside service area
- Site conditions — water source not available, second-story or ladder work, surface protection and plant pre-wet, extra soil or heavy organic growth
Nearly every job is a combination of the same twenty or so lines. The value of having them saved with a price is that the driveway you quoted this morning matches the one you quoted last week, and when your chemical costs move you can see every surface still priced on the old numbers.
What a residential exterior package looks like
A full exterior on a two-story home, several surfaces in one visit. The four columns on the left are what the customer receives. The three on the right stay in your workbook and never print.
| Description | Qty | Price | Amount | Taxable | Cost | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| House soft wash — 2 story, siding and trim | 1 | 385.00 | 385.00 | ☐ | 145.00 | 240.00 |
| Driveway and walkway — per sq ft | 1200 | 0.22 | 264.00 | ☐ | 0.09 | 156.00 |
| Roof soft wash — shingle, algae treatment | 1 | 545.00 | 545.00 | ☐ | 235.00 | 310.00 |
| Pool cage and screen enclosure | 1 | 195.00 | 195.00 | ☐ | 78.00 | 117.00 |
| Gutter face brightening — per linear ft | 160 | 1.45 | 232.00 | ☐ | 0.55 | 144.00 |
| Subtotal | 1,621.00 | — | 654.00 | 967.00 | ||
| Tax (no taxable lines on this invoice) | 0.00 | — | — | — | ||
| Total | 1,621.00 | Profit $967 (59.7%) | ||||
Full exterior, single visit. House and roof soft washed at low pressure with algaecide; flatwork surface cleaned at pressure. Landscaping pre-wet and rinsed. Screens cleaned by hand at frame contacts. Results warranted 30 days against regrowth on treated surfaces.
The interesting comparison is the roof against the driveway. The roof billed more than twice the driveway and cost nearly three times as much to perform, because a soft wash is mostly chemical while flatwork is mostly water and time. Both are good lines. But they are good in different amounts, and after fifty jobs that difference is the shape of your business. The customer’s copy is the four columns on the left; the cost and profit stay in your workbook.
Worth noting the tax line as well. In a lot of places this work is a service with nothing taxable on it at all, while in others some treatments are taxed and labor is not. Rather than applying one rate across the whole invoice, each line carries its own taxable flag — so an invoice with nothing taxable on it simply has none.
Where the template approach breaks down
Volume is what does it. A busy season is several jobs a day, most of them quoted on the spot.
Your per-square-foot rates live on your phone or in your head and drift apart from what chemical actually costs now. The commercial account you have washed monthly for two years is still on the price you quoted when you signed them. Repeat residential customers get retyped every spring. A quote given Tuesday becomes an invoice Thursday and the whole document gets rebuilt to do it. And the question that decides how you spend next season — whether roofs, flatwork, or commercial contracts actually pay best — is spread across three hundred files nobody will ever total up.
What we built instead
EG Quote & Invoice is a macro-enabled Excel workbook that turns Excel into an actual quoting and invoicing application. It keeps a client list and a priced catalog of your surfaces and treatments, so a quote written from the driveway is priced the way the last one was. It converts a won quote into an invoice in one click, tracks what has been paid and what is overdue across your commercial accounts, and shows cost and profit on every line — which is how you find out which surfaces are worth chasing.
It runs on your own PC. No account, no cloud, no subscription. The free edition has no limit on how many quotes or invoices you create and does not expire.
See EG Quote & InvoiceFree edition · Windows Excel · 32-bit and 64-bit
Other trades: Browse all invoice templates by trade →
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“Sublime. Met all of our needs well within the quoted time. Honestly can’t rate highly enough. Thank you!”
Jan H. · via PeoplePerHour, 2015
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