Priced the way Auto Detailing work is billed
A express wash & wax and a clay bar & paint polish don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Auto Detailing the way the work is really billed: off a package menu (price each, e.g. $130 a package). 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 Detailing jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Auto Detailing 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.
Ceramic coating, priced out
Numbers only mean something on a real job, so here's how SideWRK builds the ticket on a common one:
That whole $650 is your labor — no parts to front and no markup games, just your time priced like it's worth something.
What moves a Auto Detailing price
Two Auto Detailing 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:
- Vehicle size and condition — a pet-hair-and-sand SUV isn't a commuter sedan; price the interior off what you're actually pulling out of it.
- Correction level — a wash-and-wax is an hour and real paint correction is a day, so they can't live at the same package price.
- Add-ons like ozone treatment, engine bay, or headlight restoration stack on top of the package, not quietly into it.
What a Auto Detailing job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Auto Detailing is no exception. SideWRK captures vehicle size and type — sedan, SUV, boat, RV — and color and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- vehicle size and type — sedan, SUV, boat, RV — and color
- the VIN if you want it on the record
- a wash-water runoff note where local stormwater rules apply
Example note on a job: "Heavy water-spot etching — advised it may not fully polish out."
How to price a Auto Detailing job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Auto Detailing job and tap a suggestion like "Express wash & wax" or "Full interior detail" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it off a package menu
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, off a package menu (price each, e.g. $130 a package). Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Auto Detailing ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Heavy water-spot etching — advised it may not fully polish out." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Auto Detailing-specific records: vehicle size and type — sedan, SUV, boat, RV — and color, and the VIN if you want it on the record.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Auto Detailing 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 Detailing work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: a business license in some cities, and wash water generally can't run into a storm drain (Clean Water Act plus local stormwater rules).
Auto Detailing pricing — common questions
How do I price a Auto Detailing job in SideWRK?
You bill off a package menu (price each, e.g. $130 a package). Add the work — Express wash & wax, Full interior detail, Complete detail — in & out — 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 Detailing job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like ceramic coating runs about $650 in the app. Common Auto Detailing work ranges from about $90 to $650. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Auto Detailing job?
The records Auto Detailing work actually needs: vehicle size and type — sedan, SUV, boat, RV — and color; the VIN if you want it on the record; a wash-water runoff note where local stormwater rules apply. 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 Detailing work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: a business license in some cities, and wash water generally can't run into a storm drain (Clean Water Act plus local stormwater rules). SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Auto Detailing?
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
What to charge is settled above, and argued all the way out in How to Price Auto Detailing Jobs for Profit — this trade's pricing deep-dive. Cost floor in real dollars, the case against quoting by the clock, one Saturday priced two different ways, quoting a car you haven't seen, and how to put condition work in front of somebody without the awkward part. Read that one for the money side. This page is the other half of the same job: what the app does from the minute a car lands on your calendar.
- The car becomes a record before it becomes a job. Year, make, model, color, and a size — sedan, coupe, SUV or crossover, truck, van, motorcycle, boat, RV — plus the VIN if you want it on there. The notes box asks this trade's question, not a generic one: soil level, pet hair, oxidation, stains, problem areas. Size is the thing that moves your number, so it lives on the car instead of in your head. Quote that same car in October and you're reading, not remembering.
- The before shots go out with the estimate. Photos you take on the job show up on the page the customer opens, in a grid sitting above the Approve button. On a trade where the entire argument for the price is what the carpet looks like right now, showing beats describing.
- Every car keeps its own history. Open a customer, tap a vehicle, and that vehicle's jobs unfold underneath it with the date and where each one ended up. A household with three cars stays three records instead of one blurry one — which matters the first time somebody says "do the silver one again."
Repeat business — the plan hangs on the car
Fifteen of the 42 trades carry SideWRK's recurring flag, and detailing is the only one of the fifteen whose plan attaches to a vehicle — the others hang on a property, a pool, a chimney, a pet. That stops being trivia the first time a customer with a work truck and a wife's SUV wants one of them done monthly. The plan names which car, and the visit it files a month from now arrives already pointed at it.
- Set it on the customer, then pick the car. Set up recurring lays your own package menu out as chips — one tap puts express wash & wax on at $90 — and you choose the vehicle, choose weekly, every two weeks, monthly, or a number of days you name, and watch the per-visit total add itself up underneath. The plan's notes box is for the things that make the second visit fast: where they park it, the gate code, the dog. From there, filing each visit works the same as it does on every recurring trade.
Whether plans are worth selling at all is a separate argument, and it's made in full in Why Mobile Detailers Should Sell Plans, Not Washes: what the tiers should be, why the route decides your wage more than the price does, when in the job to ask, and what a fleet account changes. Set the plan price over there. Build the plan here.
How detailing bills
There are no hours anywhere in a detailing ticket. Add work to a job and you get two boxes — how many, and what each one costs — with $130 sitting in the price field as a suggestion and this trade's package menu below it to tap from. The instruction the app prints over that menu is the honest one: tune by vehicle size. There is still an hourly rate in Shop, and it is labelled for exactly what it does, which is custom time-based lines and nothing else. Unlike most trades on the platform, nothing gets carved out of these prices for materials either. Detailing books at all labor, so the number on the line is the number you're working for.
The prices further up this page are the packages. These are the other six lines SideWRK loads for this trade — the ones that price what's actually in the car:
Same rate data as the package prices above, and just as editable. Three of the six — shampoo, pet hair, headlights — are chips on the tap menu; the rest you type in when the car asks for them. They exist so the pet hair and the smell get billed instead of absorbed.
Two taps and a typed line built it — the complete detail and the shampoo are chips on the menu; the engine bay is one you write in. The engine bay went on marked optional, so it reached the customer's page as a checkbox with the rest of the ticket; they unchecked it, the total came down to $370, and that's the number their typed name landed on. Set the deposit on that estimate to 25% and the approval page asks $92.50 to hold the day, leaving $277.50 due when the truck's finished. Deposits are per estimate — waived, 10, 25, 33 or 50 percent, your call each time — and the card side of it needs Stripe connected.
Which condition lines to send as optional, and how to say the price out loud while you're walking the car, is the pricing guide's territory. It has a stance on it.
Multiplying jobs
Most of what separates a busy month from a slow one happens between jobs, in the time you don't have. Three things the app carries for you:
- The photos they texted you become the first draft. Draft it with AI takes up to three photos and a description — talked in, if typing on a phone in a driveway isn't your idea of a good time — and comes back with line items priced off this trade's own twelve services and your rate. They land as ordinary editable lines and nothing goes to the customer; the screen says as much, because an AI draft is a starting point and not a quote. It's a Pro feature, and the free 14 days run at Pro level, so it's there from the first day.
- The calculators live in the app, not just on the website. Shop → Pricing tools opens the Auto Detailing calculator in a sheet without leaving the job, next to find-your-hourly-rate, is-this-job-worth-it, and what-does-the-drive-cost. Same tools as the free ones on this site. You just don't have to go get them.
- What's left in the van, counted. Truck stock starts a detailer off with the five things you actually run out of — microfiber towels, wash soap, tire shine, wax or sealant, applicator pads — and each one takes a reorder point you set yourself: warn me when down to. Set it at one for the sealant and a bag for the towels. Inventory flags them before the Saturday you can't finish.
All of it runs on a seeded detailing business in the live detailing demo — free, no signup, nothing to install.
Price it now
Package, vehicle size, condition add-ons, and your hard costs for the job so the profit line underneath is a real one. This is the same free calculator the detailing page runs, and it treats condition work as a surcharge on top of a package — a lighter model than the app's, where each of those lines carries a full price of its own. Both are starting points. The app's is the one that ends up on an estimate:
The paper worth keeping
The record list further up names three things a detailing job puts down. This is what each of them is actually for:
- The wash water. Detergent or oily wash water generally can't run into the street, the gutter, or a storm drain. Plenty of cities want it captured, reclaimed, or sent to landscaping or the sanitary sewer instead — the Clean Water Act, plus whatever your local stormwater ordinance adds on top. That's the rule as written, not a judgement about how you work, and pinning down what your own city asks for is worth doing early: the gear that does it is a real line in your costs, which is where the pricing guide files it. SideWRK prints the caution on every estimate and invoice as a standing note, so the homeowner whose driveway you're standing in has read it too.
- The car, named on the paper. The vehicle line — year, make, model, and the VIN once you've entered one — prints in the header of every estimate and invoice, right under the customer's name. On a trade where "the silver one" is a sentence people genuinely say, the document says which car you did.
- April, already done. Numbered invoices, the payments against them, and the costs you only ever entered for yourself all land in the year-end wrap-up — income and costs as spreadsheets, a printable page for whoever does your taxes, and no shoebox.
SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice — it helps you keep the records. The rules stay your city's and your state's, and meeting them stays yours.