Priced the way Auto Glass work is billed
A windshield replacement and a rear glass replacement don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Auto Glass the way the work is really billed: off a per-service menu (price each, e.g. $350 a windshield). Tap the work, put in the numbers, and the line prices itself — no napkin math, no undercharging a job because you rushed the quote.
What Auto Glass jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Auto Glass work — researched to be realistic, so you can send an estimate that isn't a guess. Adjust any of them to your market in a tap.
Typical starting prices in the app — your area, your materials, and your reputation move them. You set your own; these just keep you from undercharging on the first quote.
Windshield replacement, priced out
Numbers only mean something on a real job, so here's how SideWRK builds the ticket on a common one:
SideWRK puts the parts on at what you actually paid — so the $140 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Auto Glass price
Two Auto Glass jobs that look the same on paper can be a hundred dollars apart once you're on site. Here's what actually changes the number — the things to size up before you quote:
- ADAS — a windshield with a camera behind it needs recalibration, and that's its own line, not a courtesy you eat.
- Glass type and availability — an OEM windshield for a newer model can cost more than the entire install on an older one.
- Cure time — mobile jobs in cold weather take longer for the urethane to set to a safe drive-away, and that's your time on site.
What a Auto Glass job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Auto Glass is no exception. SideWRK captures which glass — windshield, side, rear, quarter, sunroof and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- which glass — windshield, side, rear, quarter, sunroof
- any ADAS camera or sensor behind the glass
- the safe drive-away / urethane cure time
- whether ADAS recalibration was done
- the VIN
Example note on a job: "ADAS recalibration recommended after replacement — customer declined; camera-based safety features may be affected."
How to price a Auto Glass job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Auto Glass job and tap a suggestion like "Windshield replacement" or "Rock chip repair" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it off a per-service menu
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, off a per-service menu (price each, e.g. $350 a windshield). Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Auto Glass ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "ADAS recalibration recommended after replacement — customer declined; camera-based safety features may be affected." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Auto Glass-specific records: which glass — windshield, side, rear, quarter, sunroof, and any ADAS camera or sensor behind the glass.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Auto Glass estimate for approval. Your customer approves from their phone, the invoice goes out, and you get paid — card or Apple Pay, on the spot.
Staying on the right side of the rules
SideWRK documents your Auto Glass work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: FMVSS safe drive-away time and, on ADAS-equipped vehicles, a recalibration disclosure so the customer knows their safety systems were addressed. The app flags the permit and license triggers so they never surprise you mid-job.
Auto Glass pricing — common questions
How do I price a Auto Glass job in SideWRK?
You bill off a per-service menu (price each, e.g. $350 a windshield). Add the work — Windshield replacement, Rock chip repair, Side window replacement — enter the numbers, and each line prices itself. Parts go on at your cost, so you see real profit and not just the total.
What does a typical Auto Glass job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like windshield replacement runs about $350 in the app — roughly $140 of that is your labor and about $210 is parts at your cost. Common Auto Glass work ranges from about $75 to $350. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Auto Glass job?
The records Auto Glass work actually needs: which glass — windshield, side, rear, quarter, sunroof; any ADAS camera or sensor behind the glass; the safe drive-away / urethane cure time. They stay on the job as you work, so the paper trail is built instead of reconstructed later, and the disclosures this trade needs print on the estimate and invoice themselves.
Do I need a license to do Auto Glass work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: FMVSS safe drive-away time and, on ADAS-equipped vehicles, a recalibration disclosure so the customer knows their safety systems were addressed. SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you. It flags the permit and license triggers so nothing sneaks up on you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Auto Glass?
Yes — it runs all 42 trades, each priced and documented its own way. If you run more than one, the Multi-Trade plan unlocks them all and switches between them in a tap.
Your first jobs
Deciding the number is a separate skill, and it gets its own long argument in How to Price Windshield Work: Chip, Replace, ADAS: where a chip stops being repairable, aftermarket glass against OEE, the two calibration methods and which one a driveway can't do, and the deductible question worth asking before anybody hands you cash. Go there to work out what to charge. Stay here for what happens after you've decided — the record the app builds while you work, starting the moment a cracked windshield lands on your calendar.
- The car gets read before it gets quoted. A new job opens the vehicle form — year, make, model, and then two dropdowns no other trade on the platform has. Which glass: windshield, side or door, rear, quarter, sunroof, multiple. And what's behind it: unknown, no, camera at the windshield, rain and light sensor, both. Unknown is a real answer and the app keeps it as one, because standing in a parking lot you sometimes don't know yet. Under it, a notes box prompting for the four things you'd otherwise be trying to recall from a phone call: crack length, chip count, mouldings and clips, and where the vehicle parks.
- The VIN is already a barcode, and it's sitting on the glass you're about to pull. Open the scanner, put the camera on the Code 39 strip at the door jamb or the base of the windshield, and the app reads it — through a decoder that works on an iPhone in Safari, which the browser's own barcode reader does not. Seventeen characters go out to NHTSA's free lookup and come back as the year, make and model, already typed in. You wanted the VIN on the paperwork anyway. This way you get the vehicle with it.
- The estimate is a page they open on their phone, not a number you say through a truck window. Your lines, then your job photos in a grid, then the Approve button underneath them, so the crack sits between the price and the signature. Approving takes their typed name, and that name prints on the document with the date they typed it. The page tells them the estimate is good for fourteen days.
- Quiet estimates get chased without you doing it. Three days after it went out, then seven, the app emails the customer a plain nudge with the same link. Two, then it stops. And when one genuinely dies, there's a Mark lost button with four reasons behind it — price, timing, ghosted, other — which is how you find out in November whether you're losing windshields on money or on speed.
Repeat business — there's no plan to sell here
Fifteen of the 42 trades SideWRK runs carry a recurring flag, and the app will build those operators a plan that files its own visit every cycle. Auto glass is not one of the fifteen, and it shouldn't be. Nobody subscribes to a windshield. So the second job on the same vehicle comes out of the record you kept on the first one, and the app is built for that instead of pretending otherwise.
- "Do this again" is a button. It sits on any job you've finished, and tapping it writes a fresh estimate for the same customer, pointed at the same vehicle, carrying the same lines at the same prices, ready for you to edit. Payments and photos don't come along; neither does a credit line if you ever wrote one. A van back for its second windshield in two years is two taps and a send.
- The vehicle is the record, not just the person. Vehicles hang off the customer, so a company with four vans is one customer with four vehicles — each carrying its own glass, its own camera answer and its own VIN. Starting a job picks one off a dropdown of that customer's vehicles, and every row in your jobs list reads the customer's name and then the vehicle, so four vans never collapse into one line that says the company name.
- The review ask has a ceiling written into it. Once a job's done, one email asks the customer for a review; about three days later, one reminder. That's the whole ask. The function won't send a third. You can switch it off entirely in Shop if you'd rather ask people yourself.
Where those second and third vehicles come from in the first place — recon lots, detailers and dent techs working the same cars, the mechanic who doesn't want glass work — is How Auto Glass Techs Land Referral Partners This Summer, and it takes a real position on what the cheap chip job is actually for. That's the argument. This is the filing cabinet.
How auto glass bills
Nothing on an auto glass ticket is billed by the hour. The work line asks two questions instead — how many, and what does each one cost — and it opens with 350 already sitting in the price field. Shop does keep an hourly rate, under a label that admits its whole job: the default labor rate, used only for custom time-based lines. Above the tap menu the app prints its own warning, which is the honest one to print. Price is editable. Glass cost varies a lot by vehicle.
The price list further up this page is the six job titles the app offers you when you open a new job. What you tap when you actually price the work is a second list, and it isn't quite the same one — same numbers where the two overlap, but it splits the windshield in two by vehicle and leaves the reseal to be written in. Each button carries its own price on its face:
The truck and SUV line is the one worth noticing: it's a full price of its own, not a percentage laid over the car number. Same editable defaults as everything else. They're there so the first quote you send isn't a guess.
Glass goes on as a part, and parts in this trade carry one of three conditions: new, used, or customer-supplied. Anything that isn't new prints as a tag on the line itself, so a customer who brought their own windshield reads Cust-supplied on their own invoice, next to what you charged to fit it. That is a conversation you want in writing before you install somebody else's glass, not after.
Two taps built that, both of them straight off the menu. Put a 25% deposit on that estimate and the second they approve it, their own page asks for $187.50 to hold the date, leaving $562.50 for when the glass is in and the camera reads straight. You choose that percentage estimate by estimate from five settings: waived, 10, 25, 33, 50. Taking it on a card means having Stripe connected first. The glass itself goes on with your real cost in a box the customer never sees, which is the only way the profit number the app shows you means anything.
Whether $750 was the right number for that particular truck belongs to the pricing guide. It argues a position there; this page only shows you how the ticket gets built.
Multiplying jobs
A mobile glass week lives or dies on the gaps — the drive, the wait for cure, the evening you meant to send three quotes. Four things the app picks up in those gaps:
- The calculator opens inside the job. In the add-work form, "Build it with the takeoff calculator" pulls this trade's own windshield calculator up in a sheet with your labor rate already handed to it. Finish the number and its lines post back into the estimate as one work chunk, not a figure you squint at and retype into another box.
- The cracked-glass photo they already sent you is enough to start. Draft it with AI takes as many as three photos plus a description — dictate that if you'd rather not thumb-type standing beside the truck — and hands back priced line items built on this trade's own numbers and your own rate. Every one is editable, and none of them go anywhere near the customer until you send them; the screen tells you that outright, because a machine's first guess is not a quote. It's a Pro feature, and your first two weeks run at Pro level, so you can try it on job one.
- The tube of urethane you're one job away from running out of. Truck stock arrives pre-loaded for this trade with six lines: urethane adhesive, glass primer, chip repair resin, razor blades, moulding clips, wiper blades. Each carries a threshold you choose — the field reads "warn me when down to" — set out of the box at two tubes of urethane and two pairs of wiper blades. That's Inventory telling you on Thursday, rather than a driveway telling you on Saturday.
- The estimate tells you it's been read. A customer opening yours triggers a push to your phone. No push registered on any device, and it arrives as email instead. Strictly one channel: the code sends the email only when the push didn't go, precisely so it can't ping you twice for the same open. Read-but-not-answered is a different follow-up call than heard-nothing, and this is how you tell them apart.
Every one of those is running right now in the live auto glass demo, on a seeded glass shop you can open without signing up for anything.
Price it now
Pick the package, say what the vehicle is, add the calibration, and put your own hard costs in so the profit figure underneath means something. The auto glass page runs this same free tool. Worth knowing before you trust one against the other: it handles vehicle size the opposite way from the app, multiplying one base price up (truck and SUV ×1.4, luxury and ADAS-heavy ×2) where the app just carries a truck windshield as a line of its own. That same truck job with a calibration reads $740 here and $750 in the app. Ten dollars apart, both of them a place to start from, and only one of them ends up on paper:
The paper worth keeping
Five records were listed further up this page. Two of them become notices printed on every estimate and invoice you send in this trade, a third notice states plainly what the app isn't, and one more thing rides the header of the document itself. What each is for:
- The wait before they drive it. The urethane bonding a replaced windshield has to cure before the vehicle moves, and how long that takes depends on the adhesive, the temperature and the humidity — which is why the wait is yours to set and yours to state, and the app prints it on the document as a notice rather than pretending to know it. What's at stake is in the notice too: driving early can compromise the glass bond and the vehicle's crash performance. That's the rule as written. It isn't a judgement about how you work, and the customer standing there with keys in their hand has now read it.
- The calibration line, including the times there isn't one. A vehicle with a camera or sensors behind the glass — lane-keep, automatic braking, rain sensing — may need recalibration after a replacement. When recalibration isn't part of the work you did, the document says so. That's the notice doing the one thing a memory can't: the customer who waved it off has it in writing that they waved it off. The insurance side of that conversation is the pricing guide's, and it's covered there properly.
- Which car it was. Directly beneath the customer's name at the top of every estimate and invoice sits the vehicle: year, make, model, then the VIN as soon as you've entered one. Skip all three and the line falls back to the glass you selected, so even a thin record still states which piece of glass you replaced. Three white vans in one lot is not a hypothetical in this trade.
- What you owe in April. Your numbered invoices, what got paid against each, and the private cost side you were only ever tracking for yourself all feed the year-end wrap-up. Out of it come spreadsheets for income, costs and expenses, QuickBooks-shaped copies of the invoices and expenses, and a one-page printed summary for whoever files for you. A year of glass invoices is a lot to reconstruct in March.
SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice, and it doesn't determine or guarantee compliance with any licensing, safety, insurance, or federal motor-vehicle-safety-standard requirement. It helps you keep the records. Meeting the rules stays yours.