Priced the way HVAC work is billed
A service call / diagnostic and a refrigerant recharge don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices HVAC the way the work is really billed: off a flat service-call menu — a $110 diagnostic, then priced work (e.g. $220 a line). 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 HVAC jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common HVAC 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.
Refrigerant recharge, 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 $193 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a HVAC price
Two HVAC 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:
- Refrigerant — the type and the pounds you add is a real cost, and an older R-22 system isn't priced like an R-410A one.
- System size — a full changeout scales with the tonnage and the equipment, not with your hours.
- Season — you hold your price in a July heat wave and only discount, if at all, in the shoulder months.
What a HVAC job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and HVAC is no exception. SideWRK captures the system type — split, heat pump, furnace, mini-split and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the system type — split, heat pump, furnace, mini-split
- the refrigerant type (R-410A, R-32, R-454B, R-22)
- a gas-fired / carbon-monoxide flag
- an EPA Section 608 guard so a refrigerant circuit is never just vented
- a mechanical permit
Example note on a job: "Recharged aging system — advised leak may recur; replacement recommended."
How to price a HVAC job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a HVAC job and tap a suggestion like "Service call / diagnostic" or "AC tune-up" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it off a flat service-call menu
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, off a flat service-call menu — a $110 diagnostic, then priced work (e.g. $220 a line). Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the HVAC ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Recharged aging system — advised leak may recur; replacement recommended." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the HVAC-specific records: the system type — split, heat pump, furnace, mini-split, and the refrigerant type (R-410A, R-32, R-454B, R-22).
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the HVAC 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 HVAC work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: an HVAC license and a mechanical permit, plus EPA Section 608 certification to open a refrigerant circuit — the app won't let you document venting refrigerant. The app flags the permit and license triggers so they never surprise you mid-job.
HVAC pricing — common questions
How do I price a HVAC job in SideWRK?
You bill off a flat service-call menu — a $110 diagnostic, then priced work (e.g. $220 a line). Add the work — Service call / diagnostic, AC tune-up, Capacitor 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 HVAC job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like refrigerant recharge runs about $350 in the app — roughly $193 of that is your labor and about $157 is parts at your cost. Common HVAC work ranges from about $110 to $350. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a HVAC job?
The records HVAC work actually needs: the system type — split, heat pump, furnace, mini-split; the refrigerant type (R-410A, R-32, R-454B, R-22); a gas-fired / carbon-monoxide flag. 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 HVAC work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: an HVAC license and a mechanical permit, plus EPA Section 608 certification to open a refrigerant circuit — the app won't let you document venting refrigerant. 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 HVAC?
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
The first HVAC call you take on your own is almost never a planned one. It's 96 out, the house is hot, and whoever answers the phone and can be there today has the job. Price isn't what wins it. What wins it is the twenty minutes on that driveway, and four things in the app carry those twenty minutes:
- The number goes out before the wrench does. Tap the diagnostic off the menu, add what you found, send the estimate from the side yard. It carries your name, your logo, and your license number on the document itself, and the customer approves it by typing their name on their own phone — that typed name is the signature, sitting on the same page as the price. A homeowner who's been burned by a verbal quote notices which one you sent.
- Photos do the arguing. The bulged capacitor, the iced evaporator, the contactor with a pole burnt off. Shoot them on the job and they ride out with the estimate, so you stop trying to describe a part nobody has ever seen. It's also the cheapest defense there is against "he told me it was something else."
- On a change-out, get the equipment covered. If the job means you're buying a condenser before anyone has paid you, set a deposit on that one estimate — waived, 10, 25, 33 or 50 percent — and the customer can pay it by card the second they approve. Per estimate, not per business: the emergency capacitor doesn't need one and the four-thousand-dollar system does.
- Write the sentence that survives the callback. Every job has a note field, and what you put in it lands on the customer's copy of the estimate and the invoice, not just in your memory. Say there what you said out loud — the system's age, what you advised, what you'd do next. Six months later when it's low again, that line is the difference between an argument and a second job.
Where the calls themselves come from is a different problem, and the lead sites are the expensive answer to it. Getting found covers the free listings, the review ask, and the public page that shows up when somebody types your name into a search bar.
Repeat business — the plan you sell on the driveway
The repair is money you already earned. The maintenance agreement is the only other thing you can sell on that call, and the window for it is about as long as it takes you to write up the invoice. Miss it and you're a phone number in somebody's texts; catch it and you own spring and fall on that address.
When to bring it up. After you've explained the repair, before you hand over the invoice. During the diagnosis they're anxious and watching money go out the door. After they've paid, the conversation is finished and you're carrying gauges back to the truck. The middle is where it lands, because you've just proved you know their equipment and you're already talking about numbers.
Build it before you pitch it. Two visits a year is the floor: spring for cooling, fall for heat. One a year undersells it — the customer ends up paying for something they never see happen. Write down exactly what's in each visit before you ever quote a price. Cooling side: refrigerant pressures, condenser coil, drain pan and line, capacitors and contactors, supply and return temperatures. Heating side: heat exchanger, igniter and flame sensor, temperature rise, venting. If you can't say what's in it, you'll be renegotiating the price at every renewal.
Price it off your own menu. The app starts an HVAC tune-up at $150. Two of those bought one at a time is $300. Put the plan at $249 for the year with ten percent off repairs and first call when it's 95 out, and the customer gets a real $51 discount for committing while you get two visits you route on a Tuesday instead of a Saturday. And a stance worth arguing about: bill the year, not the month. The franchise shops bill monthly because they have a dispatcher and a billing department to absorb the churn — one person running a hundred small subscriptions is doing office work without an office. Take the year on the driveway, card or check, done. If $249 once is a dealbreaker, that plan wasn't surviving its first renewal anyway.
Hypothetical, but it's the ordinary version of this call: twelve-year-old condenser quits on the first hot weekend, you swap the run capacitor, the system lights off. The $249 is found money on a driveway you were already standing in, and the customer is scheduled instead of shopping. The arithmetic gets loud further out — 100 active plans at $249 is $24,900 booked before a single repair call, and those same customers hand you most of their repair work on top of it.
The objection, and it's coming on every older system. "It's twelve years old. Why would I pay to maintain something on its way out?" Answer it with arithmetic instead of adjectives, because that's the strongest case for a plan, not the weakest. On the app's own numbers: let the coil load up for a season and you're looking at $220 for the coil and filter clean plus $350 for a recharge if it's gone low. That's $570 against $249 for the year. One skipped tune-up pays for two of them.
Two more things that decide whether it closes. Lead with prevention, never the discount — open with "you save ten percent on repairs" and what the customer actually hears is he expects me to need more repairs. And when you get "can I call you in the spring to set it up," offer to put the spring date on the calendar right then. Most people mean it and most don't do it; a date survives, an intention doesn't. If it's still no, leave clean. Hard pressure costs you the repair relationship, and that's worth more than any single enrollment.
What the app does about it, precisely. SideWRK doesn't spawn HVAC plan visits on a cadence. Recurring plans are switched on for the route work — pool routes, lawn accounts, quarterly pest — and HVAC isn't built that way here. What it does instead is make the second visit cheap to produce:
- The plan is a line. "Maintenance plan — year one" goes on the same ticket as the capacitor at $249, priced like any other line and collected with the same payment. Nothing special to set up.
- The next visit is a copy, not a re-type. "Do this again" opens a fresh estimate for that customer and that system with the last visit's lines at the last visit's prices, ready to edit. Fall's visit is spring's visit with the heating items swapped in.
- The property remembers itself. Split or heat pump, R-410A or R-22, gas-fired or electric — it's on the record with the service address, so the spring visit starts from what you already know instead of from a shrug in the driveway.
- The date goes on the job. Put the spring date on the estimate the day you sell the plan and it's sitting on your schedule. A plan you can't see on a calendar is a plan you'll renew by accident.
Two things decide whether any of that happens. The first is when you bring it up. Cold outreach does not sell maintenance plans — a postcard asking a stranger to commit to a yearly agreement closes almost never, and a follow-up call a week later is barely better. The window that works is the service call itself, while you are still standing in front of a system you just fixed and the relief is fresh. It lasts about fifteen minutes, and once you are loading the truck it has closed.
The second is volume, because the plan does not feel like a business until there are enough of them. For a one-person shop the tipping point sits near a hundred active plans: below that it reads as paperwork, above it your spring and fall stop depending on the weather. A hundred customers at $249 is roughly $24,900 before a single repair call, and plan customers hand you most of their repair work on top of it. Getting there is twelve to eighteen months of asking on every call — one or two a week, which is what three to five service calls a week converting at one in five actually looks like.
How HVAC work bills
HVAC is a flat-rate trade and SideWRK bills it that way. The estimate form never asks for your hours: the quantity field is labelled Qty and the one beside it is Price each, so a line is a job off the menu, not a stretch of your afternoon. The starting numbers up the page and the menu inside the estimate form are the same six prices — which is the whole point of flat rate. What you say at the curb is what prints on the invoice. There's one hourly line in the menu for the odd job that fits nothing else, a fabricated bracket or an hour chasing a nuisance trip, and the shop rate you set is used only for lines like that.
The load-bearing one is the diagnostic. It leads the menu at $110 because it's the only thing you can charge for before you know what's wrong, and because a tech who shows up for free is a tech who spends July driving for free. Here's an ordinary call, itemized the way the app builds it:
The coil clean goes on as an optional add-on, so the total lands at $280 if she leaves it for another day — the same $390 of base work, less the same $110 credit. Parts ride at your cost underneath, so what the Money tab shows you cleared is real profit and not a markup wearing a costume.
What crediting the service call actually does. The button reads "− Credit service call," and it adds one more line to the job at a negative price, described as the service call credited toward the repair. It isn't a discount code and it doesn't erase the $110 — the fee stays visible above it and the credit sits underneath it in writing, which is precisely why a customer believes it happened. Two guardrails ship with it. The amount is capped at what the job currently totals, so a credit can never drag an invoice below zero. And once one credit line exists, the button is gone: one fee, credited once.
The other pricing conversation in this trade is bigger than any menu line — the twelve-year-old system where the honest answer might be "don't fix this." Repair or Replace? How HVAC Techs Make the Honest Call is the deep-dive: two rules of thumb that hand you opposite answers on the same unit, which one to trust and why, what separates a real recommendation from an invented one, and how to put the choice in front of a homeowner as three priced options instead of a verdict. Read it before the next compressor call, not during it.
Multiplying jobs
Summer brings the calls. What decides the year is what happens to the ones you already touched, and that's the part that falls off the back of the truck by Thursday. These run whether you remember them or not:
- The quiet estimate gets a nudge. An estimate nobody answered gets a follow-up email at 3 days and again at 7, two at most. The change-out quote you sent in June usually wasn't rejected. It got buried under a school schedule.
- You find out when they open it. The moment the customer opens the estimate you get a push notification. If push isn't set up on your phone, that alert arrives as an email instead — one or the other, never both, because being pinged twice about the same open just teaches you to ignore both.
- The unpaid invoice reminds itself. A wrapped job with a balance gets a reminder at 3, 7, and 14 days carrying a pay link, and that link settles by card or Apple Pay. Paying you into an app you already use lives on the payment request you build and send by hand from Get paid — worth reading first, because each of those apps has its own rules about taking money for work.
- The finished job asks for the review. When a job wraps, the app emails the review request on its own and follows with one reminder a few days later. That's the entire ask, capped there deliberately — a homeowner who ignored two emails does not want a third.
- The truck tells you what it's out of. Run capacitors, contactors, float switches, a spare thermostat: each item in truck stock carries its own reorder point. Put one on a job and the count drops, and you hear that it was your last one before the next drive instead of during it.
- The price you set once comes back as a tap. Any line you price on a real job can be saved to your price book, and it reappears in Add work as a one-tap chip with its price on it. Quote a condensate pump swap at $265 in May and it's still $265 in August, without you rebuilding the number.
The live HVAC demo boots a sample business priced this trade's way, with its jobs and paperwork already on it — free, no signup. The follow-up emails above are server-side, so those you see once you are running real jobs. The feature-by-feature version is SideWRK for HVAC.
Price it now
Before you commit a number to a customer, run it. The same free HVAC calculator the HVAC app page carries, right here — no signup, nothing saved:
The paper worth keeping
The records list up the page says what a HVAC job captures. This is why each one earns its keep:
- The system, on the record. Split AC, heat pump, gas furnace, packaged unit, mini-split — plus what's in the lines and whether it burns anything — sits on the property next to the service address. That's what makes the second call cheap. You quote from the file instead of driving out to learn what you're looking at, and knowing it's R-22 before you leave the shop is the difference between a job and a wasted morning.
- The gas answer, asked before it matters. Gas-fired or electric is one field, and it's there because combustion and venting is the part of this trade that hurts people — cracked heat exchangers and bad venting produce carbon monoxide. Gas and venting work belongs with someone qualified for it, plenty of areas require working CO alarms, and the estimate you write is a record of what you did, not a safety inspection of the house.
- The permit, tracked and billed. Equipment change-outs generally pull a mechanical permit and an inspection. The job carries a permit card — number, authority, status, and rough-in and final inspections with their dates — the permit fee goes on as its own line instead of vanishing into your labor, and that number rides onto the customer's documents with everything else.
- Your license, on every document. Enter the number once and it prints on what the customer receives. HVAC work generally wants a licensed contractor, typically required above your state's minor-work limit — and with refrigerant or gas in the job, required regardless of the price. On a trade where anyone can put a magnet on a van, a license number on the paper is the cheapest credibility you will ever buy.
- Refrigerant: recover, never vent. That's federal, under the Clean Air Act, and the app is built so it will not be the paperwork for a vent. What Section 608 actually asks you to keep — the certification, the invoicing rule on large appliances, the recovery record before a system is scrapped — is laid out in full on the EPA 608 records page, with EPA's own pages linked from it. Holding the certification, and confirming what applies to your job, stays yours.
- April, already done. Numbered invoices, payments, parts receipts — they roll into a year-end wrap-up: rows, category totals, CSVs, and a printable summary your preparer can actually use. The shoebox, retired.
SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice — it helps you keep the records. The rules stay your state's and the EPA's, and meeting them stays yours.