SolarCleaningBossPro Blog — Recurring Cleanings

Reports on Recurring Solar Cleaning Customers: What to Check Each Month

Plan revenue grows quietly and shrinks quietly. A few new twice-a-year customers here, a few lapsed ones there, and unless someone looks, you do not know whether the recurring base is getting bigger or smaller. A short monthly check of your plan customers tells you, and it takes less time than a single cleaning.

Why a Monthly Look

Retention Habits That Keep Solar Cleaning Plan Customers Year After Year listed the weekly habits that keep customers. A monthly review is how you check whether those habits are working.

Weekly, the office is focused on routes: what is due, what is overdue, who skipped. Monthly, the owner should step back and look at the plan base as a whole. Is it growing? Are customers drifting? Is there a problem hiding in one part of town or on one truck?

Check 1: How Many Customers on Each Plan

Start with a simple count. How many clients are on twice a year, yearly and quarterly commercial plans? Tags make this easy: filter the client list by Twice a Year, Commercial and whatever tags you use for other plans, and use reports to see the totals.

Write the counts down each month. The trend matters more than the number. A plan base that grows a little every month is a business getting more stable. One that is flat in the busy season means plans are not being offered at first jobs, or customers are leaving as fast as they join.

Check 2: Due and Overdue on the Waiting List

Open the Waiting List map and look at the colors. How many plan cleanings are due now? How many are overdue past the 7-day grace?

A handful of overdue pins after a rain week is normal. A growing number of overdue pins month after month means one of two things: the office is not scheduling them, or you have more plan work than your trucks can handle. The color guide is in Not Due, Due Now, Overdue: Reading the Pin Colors on a Solar Cleaning Plan Map.

Check 3: Skips and Their Reasons

Look back at the month's skipped visits and the tech's notes on each. Group them:

• Weather skips: usually fine, as long as they were rescheduled.
• Access skips: wrong gate codes, dogs, nobody home. Each one should have led to updated access notes.
• Repeat skips at the same address: a customer at risk.

If the same addresses keep showing up, call those customers before they cancel.

Check 4: Failed Charges and Past-Due Invoices

Check for plan visits where the card on file did not go through, and any past-due invoices or monthly statements. A declined card left alone is one of the most common ways plan customers quietly drop off. Past-due follow-up helps, but a personal text from the office for anything older than a couple of weeks clears most of them.

Check 5: Cancellations and New Plans

Compare plans started this month with plans ended. For each cancellation, read the reason noted on the client. For each new plan, note where it came from: a first-job offer, a website sign-up, a win-back text, a commercial quote.

That comparison tells you where to put effort. If most new plans come from first-job offers, make sure every tech is making the offer. If cancellations cluster around one reason, fix that reason.

Check 6: Capacity for Next Month

Finally, look ahead. How much plan work is coming due next month, and on which trucks? A spring with many twice-a-year homes coming due at once might mean adding a truck day or bringing on seasonal help. A quiet winter month is the time to push one-time work, commercial projects and plan sign-ups. Planning for the full year is covered in Keeping the Solar Cleaning Schedule Full Year-Round With Recurring Plans.

Keep It Short

None of these checks need a spreadsheet of formulas. Six questions, the same ones every month, written down in the same place:

• How many on each plan?
• How many due and overdue?
• Which skips, and why?
• Which charges failed?
• How many plans started and ended?
• What is coming next month?

Pick a fixed day for the review, such as the first Monday of each month, and put it on the calendar. A review that happens whenever there is time never happens in May. Ten minutes on a set day beats an hour once a year.

Know Your Recurring Base

A plan base you check monthly is a plan base you can trust. For the tools behind these checks, from tags and reports to the Waiting List, visit the recurring solar cleaning software page.