SolarCleaningBossPro Blog — Commercial Arrays

Reports by Account: Knowing What Each Commercial Solar Cleaning Customer Brings In

Commercial accounts feel big. A 300-panel roof, a property owner with eight buildings, a school district with roofs and carports. But big is not the same as valuable. Some commercial accounts carry the business. Others take three trips per visit, pay late and need an escort to the roof every time. Without looking at the numbers by account, it is hard to tell which is which.

Why Look at Commercial Work Account by Account

The Commercial tag from Tags and Custom Fields for Commercial Solar Cleaning Accounts is what lets you separate commercial work from residential. Reports are where that separation pays off.

When every building is an address under one client, everything that client buys rolls up in one place: every job at every site, every statement, every payment. That turns a fuzzy feeling (“the storage company is a good account”) into something you can actually check.

Questions Worth Asking

A few questions are worth answering for every commercial account at least once a year:

• What did this account bring in over the last twelve months, across every site?
• How many visits did that take? A quarterly account with four sites is sixteen visits a year.
• Did every planned visit happen? Missed quarters are lost revenue and a risk to the account.
• How fast do they pay? A statement that sits for two months costs you more than it looks.
• How many skips were there, and why? Repeated access failures point to a problem worth fixing with the manager.

Revenue Versus Effort

Reports show what came in. You know what it took. Put the two side by side. An account that brings in a solid amount across four easy roofs with good access is a great account. An account that brings in the same amount but needs weekend work, escorts, long hose runs and a return trip half the time may be costing you more than you thought.

The time clock in the tech app records crew hours as they happen, which gives you a real sense of how long commercial days run. Compare a long commercial day to a day of residential roofs and see which one earns more per hour of crew time. This is not about dropping hard accounts. It is about pricing them right at renewal.

Commercial Versus Residential

Many solar cleaning companies run both. Filter reports by the Commercial tag and you can see commercial and residential work side by side. That helps with bigger decisions:

• Is the commercial truck earning its keep?
• Should you chase more commercial accounts, or are homes the better business in your area?
• Does commercial work smooth out the slow residential months, or pile onto the busy ones?

There is no single right mix. Reports just help you see the mix you have. For more on running both, see One Truck on Homes, One on Commercial Arrays: Splitting Solar Cleaning Routes.

Using Reports at Renewal Time

The most useful time to look at an account's report is right before you talk to them about next year. You can walk in knowing:

• How many cleanings you did, at how many sites, with photos for every one.
• Whether any sites were added or dropped during the year.
• Whether your prices still make sense for the effort.

That conversation goes better when you can say “We cleaned all four buildings every quarter, sixteen visits, photos on every one” than when you are guessing.

It also keeps you honest with yourself. If an account has grown from two buildings to six, but you are still charging the price you quoted when it was two, the report makes that obvious. If an account has shrunk because the owner sold buildings, you can plan for the gap in your commercial truck's schedule before it shows up as an empty week. Either way, you are making the decision with the record in front of you instead of from memory, and the customer can see the same record you are looking at.

Spotting Trouble Early

Reports also help you see an account slipping before it is gone. Fewer visits than planned, a site that keeps getting skipped, statements paid later and later. Any of those is a reason to text the facility manager and ask if everything is all right. Sometimes the manager changed. Sometimes the budget changed. Either way, it is better to know now than when the cancellation arrives.

Keep It Simple

You do not need to become an analyst. Check your top commercial accounts a couple of times a year, before renewals and before you set next year's prices. To see how reports fit with the rest of commercial work, visit the commercial solar cleaning software page.