SolarCleaningBossPro Blog — Recurring Cleanings

Quarterly Commercial Solar Cleaning Plans for Arrays, Carports and Rooftops

Commercial solar is a different animal. A warehouse roof, a carport over a parking lot or a ground mount behind a business can have hundreds of panels, a property manager who answers to an owner, and a schedule that cannot slip without someone noticing. Many solar cleaning companies run these accounts on a quarterly plan. Here is how to set one up and keep it running.

From Homes to Arrays

The Yearly Solar Panel Cleaning Plan: An Easy Yes for Homeowners was about the simplest residential plan. Commercial plans sit at the other end. They are visited more often, cover more panels per stop, and usually involve more than one address under the same client.

A quarterly rhythm is common because commercial owners tend to watch their systems closely, the sites often sit near roads, parking lots or fields that throw off dust, and a regular schedule is easier to budget than calling for help when the panels look bad. Your area and the customer may call for a different spacing, but quarterly is a sensible place to start the conversation.

Setting It Up: 90 Days and Many Addresses

In SolarCleaningBossPro, a quarterly plan is a minimum of 90 days between visits. Each completed cleaning restarts the count, and the site comes due on the Waiting List when the 90 days are up.

Commercial clients rarely have just one address. A property owner might have four buildings in one business park and two more across town. Set them up as one client with many addresses. Each address keeps its own panel details and its own plan, so the carport with 312 panels and the small rooftop with 40 each come due on their own count.

Give the client a Commercial tag so commercial accounts are easy to filter on the client list and in reports.

Panel Details for Commercial Sites

Commercial cards tend to be longer than residential ones, and the access notes matter even more:

• Panel count and mount: roof, ground mount or carport
• Stories and pitch for rooftop arrays, often flat roof
• Roof access side, ladder hatch or lift location
• Water source and where the spigot is
• Gate codes, check-in with the front desk, hours the site is open
• Parking lot rules for carports, such as cleaning before the lot fills

Entered once, these show on every quarterly visit. The tech who has never been to the site reads the card in the truck and knows where to go and who to talk to.

A Truck for Commercial Work

A typical setup is one truck on homes and one on commercial arrays. Commercial cleanings take longer, may need different equipment and often run at different hours. On the dispatch board, filter by truck and give commercial sites their own day or their own truck so a big carport does not wreck a residential route.

The Waiting List helps here too. When a commercial client's sites come due, you can see them together on the map and schedule them as a block. More on splitting the work is in Routing Recurring Solar Cleaning Visits: Homes on One Truck, Arrays on Another.

One Statement a Month

Property managers do not want a separate invoice for every building every quarter. Set the client to Monthly account billing and they get one statement each month covering every building or site cleaned, each line labeled with the address. That is far easier for their accounts payable team, which means you get paid with fewer questions.

Before-and-after photos taken by the tech stay with each job, so when an owner asks whether the north carport was done in March, the answer is in the record. Details are in Monthly Statements for Property Owners on Recurring Solar Cleaning Plans.

Pricing Commercial Plans

Price commercial work from your own costs and your service list. Per-panel pricing still works for large arrays, often with a lower rate per panel at volume than a single-family home. Add line items for things like an inspection or bird proofing where the site needs them. Some operators quote a fixed price per visit per site for simplicity; others keep per-panel so the price follows the system if it grows.

Whatever you pick, put it in writing on an estimate. The customer approves online, and the approved estimate becomes the scheduled job.

Keeping Commercial Accounts

Commercial clients stay when the work happens on time and they never have to chase you. Quarterly plans counted from the last visit, a Waiting List that flags overdue sites, photos on every job and a clean monthly statement cover most of it. Answer texts quickly and note any damage or concerns the tech sees.

For how quarterly commercial plans fit alongside home plans in one system, visit the recurring solar cleaning software page.