Priced the way Snow Removal work is billed
A driveway plow / clear and a full storm cleanup don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Snow Removal the way the work is really billed: off a per-service menu (e.g. driveway plow $45, storm package $85). 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 Snow Removal jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Snow Removal 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.
Full storm cleanup, 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 $135 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Snow Removal price
Two Snow Removal 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:
- Per-push vs seasonal — a per-storm price protects you in a heavy winter; a flat seasonal contract is a gamble both ways.
- Depth and timing — a pre-dawn clear before a business opens is worth more than a midday driveway.
- De-icing — salt is a material cost and a liability line, priced on top of the plow, not folded into it.
What a Snow Removal job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Snow Removal is no exception. SideWRK captures the driveway size and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the driveway size
- which surfaces to clear — drive, walks, steps, deck
- whether driveway stakes are in
- slip/refreeze-liability and snow-pile-ordinance notes
Example note on a job: "Cleared to pavement where possible — hardpack ice left under vehicle; advised salting."
How to price a Snow Removal job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Snow Removal job and tap a suggestion like "Driveway plow / clear" or "Walkways & steps" — 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 (e.g. driveway plow $45, storm package $85). Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Snow Removal ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Cleared to pavement where possible — hardpack ice left under vehicle; advised salting." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Snow Removal-specific records: the driveway size, and which surfaces to clear — drive, walks, steps, deck.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Snow Removal 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 Snow Removal work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: a business license in some places and real slip-and-fall and refreeze liability (insurance is recommended) — sidewalk-clearing deadlines and snow-pile rules are local. The app flags the permit and license triggers so they never surprise you mid-job.
Snow Removal pricing — common questions
How do I price a Snow Removal job in SideWRK?
You bill off a per-service menu (e.g. driveway plow $45, storm package $85). Add the work — Driveway plow / clear, Walkways & steps, Salting / de-ice — 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 Snow Removal job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like full storm cleanup runs about $150 in the app — roughly $135 of that is your labor and about $15 is parts at your cost. Common Snow Removal work ranges from about $40 to $150. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Snow Removal job?
The records Snow Removal work actually needs: the driveway size; which surfaces to clear — drive, walks, steps, deck; whether driveway stakes are in. 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 Snow Removal work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: a business license in some places and real slip-and-fall and refreeze liability (insurance is recommended) — sidewalk-clearing deadlines and snow-pile rules are local. 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 Snow Removal?
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
Snow is sold in the fall and paid for in the winter. The route fills in September and October, the truck doesn't earn a dollar until the first storm, and that gap makes a snow estimate a strange document — signed months early, against weather nobody has seen yet. Here's what the app is doing with it while you're out knocking on doors.
- The quote has a two-week clock on it. Fourteen days after you write an estimate it stops taking an approval and says so on the page, with the valid-through date printed under the total. That bites harder in this trade than most: a seasonal number you emailed in the first week of September is dead by the third, so send the contract when somebody is ready to sit down and read it, not in one big September mail-out you plan to chase in October.
- The name they type is the signature. They approve on their own phone, the typed name prints on the paperwork afterward with the date beside it, and a deposit comes due at yes if you asked for one — waived, 10, 25, 33 or 50 percent, set per job or left at your shop default. Whether to ask a seasonal customer for one at all is a sales question, and the guide below settles it. The mechanics live on the estimates page.
- You find out when they open it. An estimate that gets read sets off one alert — a push where notifications are switched on, an email where they're not, one or the other and never the pair, at most once per job every six hours. Somebody rereading your seasonal number in late October is somebody holding a competitor's flyer. That's a phone call, and now you know when to make it.
- A driveway at the end of a dirt road doesn't need a signal. Start a job with no bars and the customer, the site and the job are built right there on the phone with their own ids, queued in an outbox that replays when you get back to town. Nothing is retyped and nothing is lost, which matters on the rural end of a route where the cell coverage and the deep driveways tend to be the same addresses.
The pricing argument itself — per push against a flat season, run to a break-even on one driveway and worked both directions, the light winter where the customer wins and the heavy one where you do — is How to Price Snow Removal: Per-Push vs Seasonal. It is this trade’s pricing deep-dive, and it owns that argument. Read it before you quote a season; this page doesn't repeat it.
Repeat business
A snow customer is the same driveway, over and over, all winter. That makes repeat business here a mechanical problem rather than a marketing one — the customer already said yes in October. Two kinds of customer, two mechanics:
- The per-storm customer: one tap re-quotes the last one. Open the job you did on that driveway during the last storm and press Do this again. A new estimate opens against the same customer and the same site, carrying the same lines at the same prices, editable before anything goes out. Fee credits don't come along, and neither do the payments or the photos. A winter’s worth of storms is a tap each instead of a quote each, typed at five in the morning.
- The seasonal customer: the plan holds the route, the storm presses the button. Set up a recurring plan on the customer — name it, attach the driveway, then tap this trade's own services off the menu to build the standard visit, and the form shows you what one visit totals before you save it. Here's the honest part, and it's the whole reason this chapter exists: snow doesn't fall on a cadence. Weekly, every two weeks, monthly and every-N-days are calendar rhythms, and a January that dumps four times in nine days ignores all of them. So the plan is how a season gets billed — monthly across the contract, one figure the customer already agreed to — and Start this visit now is how a storm gets its visit, filed on the night it actually snows with the standard work and the price already on it. Plans that come due on their own file themselves each morning. Recurring jobs covers the whole mechanism.
- Save the lines you quote every storm. Anything you add to a job drops into your price book and comes back as a one-tap chip next time: the wording, the price, and your own private cost, which is the number that makes a ticket read as profit instead of revenue. Save the same name again and it updates rather than doubling up.
- The review ask, capped on purpose. Wrap a job and the request can go out by itself — one email, then a single reminder about three days later, and after that the app stops talking to them. Two messages is a ceiling written into the code, and it's there because the customer has no switch of their own to press. You do: turn the whole thing off in Shop if you'd rather ask over the tailgate.
How a storm bills
No clock anywhere. A snow job's work form asks for Qty and Price each ($), because a storm ticket is a list of services with a price on each one, not hours multiplied by a rate. Tap a service and the line fills itself in; the price stays editable, since a two-foot storm and a Tuesday dusting are not the same forty-five dollars. This is the menu the form deals:
The estimate form's tap-to-fill menu, straight from the app.
Four of those sit under the starting numbers in the table further up this page, and the gap is deliberate rather than a mistake worth hiding. The menu prices walks, salt and the roof rake as add-ons — what each one costs while your truck is already sitting in that driveway for the plow. The starting numbers price the same services as a visit of their own: salting a driveway you aren't plowing is a truck rolling out for a single line, and it costs what a trip costs. The storm package and the full storm cleanup split the same way — the package is the ordinary stop, the cleanup is the bigger dig-out afterward.
Three taps, three lines, and the customer can see what every dollar bought. The same three surfaces taken as the Full storm package is $85 — ten dollars under the à-la-carte total, which is exactly what a package is: the price of the whole stop instead of three services counted up. Take the package on the drive you're on every storm. Itemize when the walks and the salt are a decision the customer is still making, because a line they can see is a line they can say yes to.
That $95 is an under-six-inches number. The calculator further down steps the base up ×1.4 for six to twelve inches and ×1.8 past a foot — the same stop at $63 for the drive, $113 all in — while in the app the menu price is simply editable, which is the same thought with your thumb on it. The form's own hint says as much when the menu opens: deep storms and long driveways run more.
Ninety-five dollars is a stop worth making. A single $20 walkway line at four in the morning is not, and the app will hold that line rather than trusting you to hold it at four in the morning. Set a minimum charge for Snow Removal in Shop and any ticket landing under it raises a flag on the job itself, with one tap that writes a real Shop minimum line for the difference — it runs through the total, the tax and the invoice like every other line. Run more than one trade and each keeps its own floor.
One more number worth knowing, because it explains why this trade prices the way it does. The app's own split puts about 90 percent of a snow ticket on labor and equipment time — the $150 cleanup up the page splits $135 to you and $15 to materials. Only seven trades in the whole file sit higher, and six of those are modeled as consuming nothing at all. Snow's ten percent is salt, which is a real bag of a real product burned at a rate that changes with the storm. That's why the calculator has a hard-costs box: put your bag price in and it shows profit instead of revenue. And if you don't know how big a driveway is, the job's measure tool traces it off the satellite — for snow it hands you the square footage to size the push against, not a per-square-foot rate. This trade bills by the service; the footage is just how you tell a $45 drive from a $75 one before you've stood on it.
Multiplying jobs
Every hour you're not plowing during a storm is an hour of the only work window you get. So the multiplier in snow isn't a clever upsell — it's the driving, the ordering and the chasing you can hand off before the season starts:
- The salt counts itself down. Truck stock opens with this trade's list already written — ice melt and rock salt, shear pins and bolts, plow hydraulic fluid, driveway markers, de-icer spray — each a one-tap add, each carrying its own reorder point. Salt's is set at ten bags against one or two for everything else on that list, and that ratio is the list telling you something: a shear pin is a January errand, a pallet of salt is an October decision. Pull a bag onto a job from stock and the count drops. Take the last one and it says so on the spot. A low item raises a quiet banner the next time you open the app, once, and nothing is ever emailed or pushed about it — a weekend operator doesn't need a notification about salt. Truck stock is the whole feature.
- The morning after, in order. Every job with a date lands on a run sheet split into today, this week and later, and today's stops route themselves in Maps in a single tap. Jobs without an address get left out and counted, which is a fair description of what the address field is for. Ten driveways on one street and ten scattered across three towns bill the same and pay very differently; the schedule is where that shows up.
- The chasing runs itself. An estimate nobody answered gets a nudge on day 3 and again on day 7, and that's the end of it. An invoice nobody paid gets three, on days 3, 7 and 14, each carrying a pay link. That link lands on the approval page, and the approval page settles by card or Apple Pay, tapped from the customer's own phone. Card money you'd rather have before Monday can be pushed onto your debit card in about 30 minutes, and the fee for the speed is 1 percent. A payment request you send by hand is a different road, and the rules on it are stricter than most people taking money for work realize — getting paid lays out what each app actually permits. All of it email, none of it text messages, every one of them a switch you own.
- Buried, then not. Two photos off the same job — the driveway when you pulled in and the driveway when you pulled out — pair up as a before-and-after on the work gallery your public page carries. Almost no trade hands you proof this obvious, and a homeowner picking between two numbers in November tends to pick the one they can look at.
Truck stock, the run sheet and a whole seeded snow business are running in the live snow removal demo — free, nothing to sign up for.
Price it now
Pick the stop, set the depth, tick the add-ons, and put your own hard costs in so the number at the bottom is profit. Same free tool the snow removal page runs, dropped in here so you don't have to go looking for it — the full-size version lives at the snow removal cost calculator:
The paper worth keeping
The list further up says what a snow job captures. This is where those answers land afterward — and why a trade that works at four in the morning, in the dark, in a hurry, on somebody else's property is the one that most needs its writing-down done months in advance:
- The site, answered in October. A snow job site takes a label and a service address, then three dropdowns — driveway size (1–2 cars, 3–4 cars, or long and rural), the surfaces you clear (driveway only; plus walks; plus steps; plus the deck), and whether the driveway stakes are in (unknown, yes, or no and it needs staking) — with a notes line that asks where the snow gets piled, whether the surface is gravel or pavers, whether cars sit in the drive, and the gate code. Every one of those is a question you can answer standing in daylight in October and cannot answer at 4 a.m. in February. Gravel against concrete is a blade-height decision, and that is not something to work out by feel in the dark on a driveway you've never plowed.
- The trade's notices print themselves. Every snow estimate and invoice carries this trade's standing notices under the totals without you typing a word. That clearing and treating reduces slip-and-fall risk but never eliminates it; that ice can re-form after service and a refreeze once you've driven away is outside the operator's control; that the document records what was cleared and treated, and when; and that liability insurance is strongly recommended for snow and ice work. Then the local half: that many cities set sidewalk-clearing deadlines by ordinance, that some states and municipalities restrict where snow may be piled — never into the street, never over a hydrant — and that local rules are local, so the operator and the customer are the ones responsible for knowing the ones that apply at that address. They state the rule. They never state anything about you, because we don't know anything about you — only what you typed.
- Your note goes where the work went. A disclosure you type onto a piece of work rides that work's own lines onto the document, in italics under the group it belongs to, instead of floating loose at the bottom hoping to be read as related. The March phone call — the chipped paver, the slip on the walk, the thing that was already like that in November — gets answered by a document with a date on it rather than by whoever remembers harder. The paper trail is the same idea across every trade.
- A license line, and a caution sized to the ticket. There's a business license field in Shop → Business, and a number you put there prints on the estimate and invoice head. When a job total reaches this trade's threshold and no number is on file, the job raises a caution: it names the point where most states start requiring a contractor license, adds that splitting one project across two estimates doesn't get you under it, and says outright that SideWRK doesn't determine or guarantee compliance. In snow that's a commercial-lot conversation far more often than a driveway one — but it fires on the total, not on the trade, and a big enough contract is a big enough contract.
- April, already handled. Numbered invoices, the payments against them, your salt and fuel at cost, and the receipts you logged all roll into a year-end wrap-up — the rows, the category totals, an income CSV and a costs CSV, plus a printable summary a preparer can actually work from. A winter's money is spread across a lot of small tickets. Adding them up in April, from memory, is how a good season turns into a bad number.
SideWRK is the notebook here, not the license and not the insurance. It writes down what you cleared, what you treated, and when. It makes no ruling on whether you've met a licensing, insurance, or ordinance requirement anywhere, and it never tells you that you have.