Why you are probably underquoting

Mistake 1 — one price for every vehicle or every home

A full interior on a two-door hatchback and a full interior on a three-row SUV with a dog and two car seats are not the same job. They take different amounts of time, different amounts of product, and different amounts of physical effort.

SUVs and MPVs are roughly 41 percent of detailing volume. If your price list has no size multiplier, you are not occasionally losing money on an unusual job — you are systematically losing money on the most common one.

The same applies to cleaning. Square footage, number of bathrooms and condition are the three variables that actually drive time, and a per-visit flat rate ignores all three.

What to do instead: a base price for a defined size class, then a published multiplier. Small / mid / large / XL for vehicles; a size-and-bathroom grid for homes. The reason to publish it is that it turns a negotiation into a lookup, which is also why the argument in the driveway stops happening.

Mistake 2 — pricing the job instead of the block

The customer buys the job. You sell the block.

A two-hour detail forty minutes away consumes three hours and twenty minutes of a finite day once you count drive both ways. Add setup, teardown, water and power sorting, and the payment conversation, and you are close to four. Price the two hours and you have paid yourself nothing for nearly half the block.

This is why routing matters as a pricing input rather than only as a convenience. Two jobs in the same suburb are worth more to you than two jobs across the city at the same price, and your pricing should reflect that — through a travel band, a minimum for outlying areas, or simply declining the outlier.

What to do instead: price in blocks including drive time, and set a minimum charge that makes a single small job in an outlying area viable on its own.

Mistake 3 — consumables that never appear anywhere

Chemicals, pads, towels, bags, water, fuel, machine wear. Individually trivial, collectively a real percentage of revenue, and almost never itemised into a price because they are bought monthly and used daily.

What to do instead: total three months of consumable spend, divide by the number of jobs in that period, and carry it as a per-job cost line. It is usually larger than people guess, and once it is a number it stops being invisible.

Mistake 4 — using someone else's number

Forum and social-media prices are the worst possible pricing input, because they carry none of the context that makes them valid: local wage rates, local competition, the operator's cost base, whether they own their equipment outright, whether they are running at a loss to build a book.

What to do instead: derive your floor from your own costs, then position against the local market from there. The market tells you the ceiling. Only your costs tell you the floor, and you cannot price without both.

Calculate your floor in five minutes

1. Total your monthly business costs. Insurance, phone, software, vehicle payment and fuel, consumables, marketing, licences, accounting, equipment replacement. Include a real number for your own pay — if you do not pay yourself, the business is not profitable, it is just moving money.
2. Count your genuinely sellable hours. Not 160. Take the hours you actually work and subtract admin, quoting, driving, invoicing, marketing and the slots nobody books. For most solo operators the answer is 60 to 90 hours a month.
3. Divide. Costs ÷ sellable hours = your cost per sellable hour.
4. Add your target profit margin.
5. Multiply by the block length, drive time included.

That is your floor for that job. A quote below it is a job you are paying to do.

Look at the first two rows. Same costs, different number of sellable hours, and the floor moves by a third. This is why "what should I charge for a full detail" has no answer that does not start with your own numbers.

Run it with your own figures in the free calculator.

What this has to do with software

Once you have a floor and a size multiplier, the problem becomes applying them consistently on a phone, in a driveway, with a customer standing there. That is a tooling problem, and it is the one Rigsheet is built for: trade-specific defaults with vehicle-size and home-size multipliers built in, so the quote you give matches the pricing you decided on when you were calm.

Rigsheet is from $4/month — four tiers up to $39, flat, with no per-user fee and no appointment cap. $4 buys the core, not everything. Starter has no appointment cap and no per-seat charge, but customer texting starts at Solo ($29) — worth saying before the entry price does the persuading. ZenMaid's cheapest is $19/month, caps you at 40 appointments and adds $4 per seat on top. How the per-seat model actually costs you.

Questions and answers