Priced the way Pool Service work is billed
A weekly service visit and a green-to-clean don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Pool Service the way the work is really billed: off a per-visit service menu (e.g. weekly service $65 a visit). 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 Pool Service jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Pool Service 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.
Pump / motor repair, 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 $270 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Pool Service price
Two Pool Service 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:
- Recurring vs one-time — weekly service is a route price; a green-to-clean recovery is a project price.
- Chemicals — the water tells you what it needs, and a heavy chemical week costs more than a balanced one.
- Equipment — a pump, filter, or heater repair is its own line on top of the service visit.
What a Pool Service job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Pool Service is no exception. SideWRK captures the pool type — gunite, vinyl, fiberglass, spa and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the pool type — gunite, vinyl, fiberglass, spa
- the gallons
- the sanitizer — chlorine, salt, bromine
- the service plan
- a pool-chemical handling note
Example note on a job: "Neglected chemistry — advised extra visits may be needed to fully clear the water."
How to price a Pool Service job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Pool Service job and tap a suggestion like "Weekly service visit" or "Chemical balance" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it off a per-visit service menu
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, off a per-visit service menu (e.g. weekly service $65 a visit). Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Pool Service ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Neglected chemistry — advised extra visits may be needed to fully clear the water." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Pool Service-specific records: the pool type — gunite, vinyl, fiberglass, spa, and the gallons.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Pool Service 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 Pool Service work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: water-balance service is usually exempt, but equipment repair and plaster over the minor-work limit need a C-53 pool/spa license — plus safe hazardous-chemical handling.
Pool Service pricing — common questions
How do I price a Pool Service job in SideWRK?
You bill off a per-visit service menu (e.g. weekly service $65 a visit). Add the work — Weekly service visit, Chemical balance, Filter clean — 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 Pool Service job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like pump / motor repair runs about $450 in the app — roughly $270 of that is your labor and about $180 is parts at your cost. Common Pool Service work ranges from about $65 to $450. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Pool Service job?
The records Pool Service work actually needs: the pool type — gunite, vinyl, fiberglass, spa; the gallons; the sanitizer — chlorine, salt, bromine. 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 Pool Service work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: water-balance service is usually exempt, but equipment repair and plaster over the minor-work limit need a C-53 pool/spa license — plus safe hazardous-chemical handling. SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Pool Service?
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
By August this trade's season is closing, not opening. What sits on the calendar between then and the first cold night is closings, covers, one last balance, and a conversation most operators put off — whether this customer keeps paying through the winter or you start the whole sale again in April. A job landed in the back half of the season is really two decisions taken at once: this pool now, and whether you are still on that street next spring.
So a first job matters differently in a route trade than in a repair trade. A mechanic wins a customer; a pool tech wins a stop, and a stop is a thing that either fits the loop or quietly costs money for years. Everything below is what happens on your phone between the walk-around and the yes.
- What the pool record asks before you name a price. Every pool service job is filed against a pool, and that pool record asks for seven things: what to call it, the service address, the type — in-ground gunite, vinyl, fiberglass, above-ground, spa — the gallons, the sanitizer, whether this is one-time or weekly or biweekly or monthly or seasonal, and a notes box that asks about the gate code, the dogs, the equipment, and where to park. Only the first two are required, and only one of the two — name it or address it and the record saves, everything else optional. Fill the gallons anyway. Every chemical dose scales off that number, so it is the difference between a tab count you guessed and one you can defend when the water goes sideways in September.
- Put the address on the customer too, not only on the pool. This is the single easiest thing to get wrong in this trade, and it costs you drive time rather than money, which is worse. The Schedule tab chains the day's stops into one Google Maps multi-stop link, in run-sheet order, and it builds that link from the customer's address. A pool whose address lives only on the pool record is silently counted out, and the tab says so in small type: so many stops without an address left out. Two stops with addresses is the minimum before the link shows up at all. On a route, a stop dropped from the chain is the one you drive past and come back for.
- Writing the estimate is taps, not an evening. Type what you did, or skip typing: this trade's eight services sit right below that box as chips, each carrying its own price on its face — Weekly service visit · $65. One tap writes the description, sets the count to one and drops $65 into the price, all three editable afterwards in the Qty and Price each ($) boxes, with a live This work = figure underneath. Everything you add lands as its own bundle — the service line, any part at what you paid for it, a note in plain English, photos. Write the note. It prints on the estimate and again on the invoice, and the photos travel with the link, which means the customer is reading the same green water you were standing over.
- The green-to-clean is the audition. Price it like a job. A swamp recovery comes off the same menu and it invoices at $350 for the recovery, $110 for the filter clean the algae just forced, and $120 for the balance once the water clears — $580, three lines, one estimate. At this trade's researched split, $232 of that $580 is chemical and media leaving your pocket — run it through the job-profit calculator before you put a swamp on the schedule and you will see the two numbers side by side. Folding a cleanout into "the first month of service" is a donation with a bow on it, and it sets the price of the whole account: the customer who got the swamp handled for free is the same one who balks at a weekly rate in October, and you are the one who taught them to. Charge for the audition even when you badly want the route slot.
- They approve by typing their name, and the estimate has a clock on it. No signature pad, no paper to sign. They open the link, read the lines, and type their own name in a box; that name, and the day they typed it, become part of the record. The page also shows the date the estimate is good through, and once fourteen days have gone by it stops accepting and says so instead of failing silently. Opening it pings you: a push notification, or an email in its place if no push lands. It is one channel or the other by design — the function will not send both, and it will not ping you twice about the same estimate inside six hours.
- The deposit is taken at yes, not at the supply house. Waived, 10, 25, 33 or 50 percent, chosen on the estimate itself or set once in Shop so every job afterwards opens holding it. On a $65 skim it is noise. On the pump job worked out two chapters down it is the difference between buying the motor with their money and floating it out of yours.
Repeat business, and the close
Pool service is one of the trades in SideWRK that carries a real recurring plan, and it is the trade the feature was built for. A plan is a template on a customer: pick weekly, every two weeks, monthly, or every so many days; set the first visit; fill the standard visit work, which opens already holding Weekly service visit at $65 because that is the first row of this trade's menu; add the gate code and the dog. A running per-visit total sits under the rows while you build it.
Then it runs on its own. A job on the server files each visit the morning it comes due, pre-filled, dated, already in progress, wearing a Recurring tag in the job list. If you are standing at the pool a day early, Start this visit now files it from the plan card and moves the plan on. Nothing about that is a scheduler you have to feed. The route is the asset, and the plan is how the app holds it.
Which brings up the thing most route advice skips: the monthly fee is the floor of an account, not the ceiling, and the two ways of selling the same pool are further apart than they look. Take a year on one standard pool, both ways, at the app's own prices:
Now the same pool on a flat monthly contract. Pick any figure and the shape holds; $130 a month is a round one to think with, so: $1,560 of weekly service, two filter cleans at $110, a $180 salt cell clean, the $250 opening and the $225 closing. $2,435 for the year, of which $875 is work attached to the contract rather than the contract itself. Same pool, $1,290 apart, and the year the pump lets go it is a $600 replacement handed to you without a competing bid, because you are already the pool guy.
Neither book is wrong. The contract buys the standing relationship and the repairs nobody shops around; the drop-in price is what an hour of your time is actually worth. Knowing which one you sold is the whole discipline, and the next chapter runs the per-visit math that decides it.
The moment to sell the plan is right after a one-time job, standing beside water that is finally clear. Not a speech about chemistry — one offer with a price, a day, and a real opening. "I run weekly service for a few customers on this street. Water testing, chemicals as needed, filter and pump checked, and you stop thinking about it. I have one slot open on Thursday. Want it?" The neighborhood line is not small talk; you are selling route density to yourself while you sell certainty to them. Because certainty is what they are buying. Nobody resists a pool contract because they enjoy testing water. They resist committing before they have watched you show up. The monthly number is rarely the real obstacle either — set against a $350 recovery when a summer gets away from them, or a $600 line when the motor quits, a monthly rate reads cheap. What they are weighing is you, not the price.
- "I don't want to be locked in." Offer thirty-day cancellation, and offer it before they ask. The ones who are going to cancel tend to do it early, while it still reads as a new bill. Once it has quietly worked through a season, switching is a hassle nobody goes looking for. So the clause costs you very little and it deletes the hesitation on the spot.
- "I might just do it myself." Do not argue with this. Plenty of homeowners mean it in May. Holding the chemistry all the way through a hot August is a different job, and a missed treatment turns into a bloom and a recovery invoice. Say "totally fine — if you'd rather have it handled, I'm here," and then stop talking. Some of them call in the fall.
- "Let me think about it." Do not hand over a card and hope. "Of course. I'm on this street Thursday, I'll test the water free and we can decide then." That is the out and the follow-up in one sentence. Show up, test, ask once more, and if they are still undecided, move on — you spent fifteen minutes.
- The ones who need to watch you first. Run them month to month at a premium and say why out loud — on the $130 shape above, that is $150 month to month against $130 on six months, because the consistency is what lets you plan the route. Honest, and it makes the lower rate feel earned instead of haggled. Set yourself a reminder for month three and ask once. After six months of reliable service, whoever has not converted is not going to — keep servicing them and stop pushing.
Then the close, which is where this trade actually loses money. A route that bills five or six thousand a month through the summer bills what in January? That gap is the real problem in pool service, and it is worth deciding on purpose in August rather than discovering in November. There are two honest answers: keep a reduced winter cadence, a monthly look at the cover and the chemistry that keeps the account and the relationship warm — or go dormant and re-sell every account in spring, which is cheaper this month and more expensive in April.
If you pick the winter cadence, build it as a new plan rather than trying to change the old one. A plan's cadence is set when you create it; the card afterwards offers Start this visit now, Pause, Resume and Delete, and no edit. And know what Pause does before you lean on it for four months: it stops the visits being filed, but the plan keeps the due date it was paused on, so one parked in October and resumed in April starts working forward from October, one visit per daily run, rather than from the day you came back. For a whole off-season, delete it and rebuild in spring. The visits you already ran stay in your jobs — the confirmation says so — and rebuilding is one screen with Weekly service visit already sitting there at $65.
None of this blasts one message at a list, and the platform never texts your customer — not once, by design. Any text they get came off your phone because you sent it.
How pool service bills
There is no clock in this trade's estimate. Add work to a pool job and you get two boxes side by side, Qty and Price each ($) — a count and a price, not hours and a rate — under eight tap-to-fill services covering the recurring visit and the repairs that ride on it. Every one is editable; these are where SideWRK starts you, not where it holds you.
The eight rows the app taps in. Note the pump line: $600 is the replacement, hardware and all, while the $450 in the table further up this page is the repair — seals, a capacitor, a bearing. Two different tickets on purpose, and that reason is written into our build check in words: every menu row either matches its priced service to the cent or declares why it stands alone, and a row that declares nothing fails the build.
That $75 is the default this trade saves in Shop, and its own label says exactly what it is for: custom time-based lines. The two hours after a storm dropped half a tree in the deep end. The afternoon spent chasing a leak nobody can find. The menu prices the menu; the hourly rate prices the work the menu has no row for, which on a route is a much smaller share of the week than a $75 number makes it sound.
Now the part that decides whether any of this is a business. SideWRK carries a labor share for every trade, and pool service is set at 0.6 — the app's own read, published in our rate report alongside the $75, that only sixty cents of a pool dollar is your hands. The other forty is chlorine, acid, shock, media, a cell, an o-ring. That share is not decoration. It changes the app: because it is under one, guided setup hands a pool operator a truck-stock step a house cleaner never sees, and that step offers six one-tap chips for what a pool truck actually carries — chlorine tabs, liquid chlorine, muriatic acid, cal-hypo shock, test strips, o-rings and lube — each opening the form with a sensible reorder point already in it, so you only fill in your count and your cost.
Most per-visit talk in this trade ignores that forty percent completely, which is how a route price gets agreed to that cannot survive its own chemical bill. Run it: a hypothetical $130-a-month account is $1,560 across 52 visits, so $30 a visit. The menu's drop-in price for that identical visit is $65. You have just sold the same twenty-five minutes for less than half, and the chemicals come out of the $30, not the $65 — call it $12 on a balanced pool, leaving $18. Twenty to twenty-five minutes on site plus a short hop between houses is thirty to thirty-five minutes all in, so that $18 is about $31 an hour against a shop rate of $75. Put the same pool twenty-five minutes across town and the stop eats the hour: under $20, before fuel.
So the stance, plainly: a flat monthly rate is a route price, not a pool price. It only pencils when the next stop is minutes away. For a pool off your loop, oversized, or hanging off tired equipment, quote it up — on the shape above that is $150 to $170, not $130 — or decline. The cheapest thing in this trade is saying no to a bad stop, and the most expensive is servicing one for three years because nobody ran this arithmetic first.
Here is a month on one pool with a repair in it, built the way the app builds it — every line straight off the menu:
Three lines, one estimate, one approval. At the 0.6 split, $582 of that is your hands and $388 is the motor, the media and the month's chemicals — and every dollar of the $388 leaves your account before the invoice does. Which is exactly what the deposit picker is for, and why the number you pick is arithmetic rather than nerve: 25 percent is $242.50 and does not cover it; 33 percent is $320.10 and is still $67.90 short; 50 percent is $485 and buys the motor with $97 to spare. The percentage is not a personality trait. It is the parts line.
One more floor worth setting. Set a minimum charge for pool service in Shop, and a job that comes in below it says by how much, with a one-tap Shop minimum line to close the gap out in the open — instead of you padding a real line until the number looks right. It matters here more than in most trades, because the cheapest thing on this menu is a $65 visit and a $65 visit across town is a morning. The rest runs like anything else on the pool service app — put the work on, send it, collect.
Multiplying jobs
Ten pools on three streets is a different business from ten pools across a city, and the difference is not only fuel. Pool work happens in the open, on a schedule, where neighbors watch. A truck that skims the same street every Tuesday is advertising a plumber under a sink will never get, and one referral inside a tight cluster ripples, because the person next door has already watched you show up, work, and leave clear water behind.
- The route pays for the density, in the app's own numbers. A dense stop collects most of an hour's pay for well under an hour of work. The same stop with twenty-five minutes of windshield each way quietly pays half. Forty to fifty accounts is one person's route; at a hypothetical $130 a month that is $5,200 to $6,500 of contract billing before a single repair, and the $875 of attached work each account carries in a year adds about $39,000 more across forty-five of them. When two calls come in the same week, take the close one — it is worth more than the two invoices say.
- The before-and-after is the best sales asset this trade has. Green to blue is the one photograph a stranger can read without knowing anything about pools. Shoot both. From the job's Photos, Add to gallery takes the pair together and posts them to your public page as a before and after. Keep it about the water — the app tells you the same thing where you upload, because that page is public: no customer faces, plates, house numbers, addresses, or names. Same day beats a monthly batch, on your own profiles too. Every cleanout you charged properly for also produced the ad for the next one.
- Ask for the review while the water is still new. Work out what the ask is worth before you decide you are too busy for it. The drop-in book two chapters up is $3,725 a year; keep that account three years, which is unremarkable for someone who simply shows up, and it is around $11,000 before the first pump ever dies. Thirty seconds attached to a good result is the best-paying half-minute on the route. The window is roughly two hours to two days after something visible: the swamp gone blue, the pump running, a first visit on a pool that had been let go. Routine upkeep on a pool that looked fine is a weak moment to ask, because there is nothing to react to. The app will handle it if you let it: a finished job sends one review request and, a few days on, exactly one nudge behind it. Two emails per job, full stop, and Shop has a switch if you would rather own the asking yourself. If you do it yourself, do it by text from your own phone, same day — a text gets read standing in the kitchen, and an email waits in a promotions folder next to the oil-change coupon. One exception to same-day: after a repair, give it two or three days and confirm it held before you call the job closed. A review you asked for on a pump that quits again Thursday is a review you will wish you had left alone. And never attach the ask to a discount or a free visit: Google's review policies prohibit incentivized reviews, and a suspended business profile costs far more than the stars were worth.
- Let the extras be the customer's decision, in writing. Tick a line as an optional add-on and it arrives on the approval page as a box the customer can clear, the total sliding up or down underneath it while they decide. The filter clean the algae is going to force anyway, the cell clean, the closing booked in August — priced, visible, and chosen by the person paying, before you touch anything.
- Quiet nudges instead of chasing. An unanswered estimate nudges itself once at day three and once at day seven, then goes quiet — two emails, not a drip sequence. A finished job still owed money asks on day three, day seven and day fourteen, and stops there. Every one of those carries a pay link that settles by card or Apple Pay on the customer's own phone. If you would rather the money went to a handle you already have, that is the payment request you send yourself. Read what the app tells you as you save each handle: the rules for taking work money differ from one of those apps to the next, and the note is there so you know which one you are standing on before your money is sitting inside it.
- The chemical shelf tells you before the supply run does. Truck stock counts down as you use an item on a job, each item warns you at a threshold you set yourself — four gallons of liquid chlorine, your last set of o-rings — and it says so plainly when a job has just taken the last one. Truck stock is the whole picture.
A door hanger on the streets you already run is the cheapest lead this trade has, because the neighbor has watched your truck every Thursday for a year, and no advertisement can fake that. All of it is running on a sample pool business in the live demo — free, no signup, nothing saved.
Price it now
Three tools in one, and they hand off in the order the job happens. Volume takes the shape, the length and width, and the shallow and deep ends, and gives you the gallons — the number the pool record asks for and the number every dose scales from. Dosing carries those gallons across and turns your current free chlorine, pH, alkalinity and stabilizer into what to actually put in. Service prices the visit by pool size. It is the same free tool the pool service page carries, running below (full-size version here):
Free, no signup, nothing stored. Inside SideWRK the same tool sits in Shop with the rate, job-profit and mileage calculators, opening in a sheet without leaving the app.
The paper worth keeping
Higher up, this page lists what a pool job puts on the record. Here is the argument for each one, on the days nobody is asking you for it:
- Everything you learned walking the pool. Type, gallons, sanitizer, the plan, the gate code, the dog, where to park. The customer's copy shows one line of that: whatever you named the pool, or its address if you never named it. Everything else is yours alone, which is exactly why it is worth filling in. It is what makes the quote for the identical build two doors down a four-minute job, and it is what stops you re-measuring in April a pool you already measured in August.
- The log that answers "the algae came back." It is the most common complaint in this trade and it is often not a service gap: the pump run-time got cut, somebody dumped in their own shock, the filter clean you recommended got put off. Without a record that is your word against a bad month. Photograph the water at every stop, put the readings in the visit note, and write it down the day the customer mentions they added something themselves. Notes and photos live on the job, so the conversation starts with "let me look at what changed" instead of a guess — and the review you did not earn does not get written.
- The two notices this trade prints by itself. On every pool estimate and invoice, in the app's own words. The first is the chemicals: chlorine, acid and algaecide are hazardous, they are stored, transported and applied per label directions, and they are kept away from children and pets — and that routine water-balance service generally needs no contractor license, while equipment repair or installation, or plastering, at or above your state's minor-work limit generally does, with California's C-53 pool and spa contractor license named as the example. The second is the line we would rather say ourselves than have you find out later: SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice, and does not determine or guarantee compliance with any licensing or chemical-handling requirement. Where your own state actually draws those lines is yours to go and confirm. Type your license number once onto your business profile in Shop and it rides on everything you send from then on.
- The chemical receipts, already sorted. A pool operator buys in small amounts, constantly, from two or three places, and that is exactly the spending that has evaporated by March. Photograph the receipt when you add the expense and the amount, the vendor, the date and the category come back filled in for you to check. There is a materials category for the chemicals and a separate one for fuel, which is how the drive between pools stops being invisible. Those expenses, plus the numbered invoices and every payment against them, roll into a year-end summary that exports or gets handed straight to whoever does your return. The whole paper trail builds itself this way, one stop at a time.
SideWRK helps you keep the records. The rules stay your state's, and meeting them stays yours.