We run a fleet wash company, and these are the numbers we read every Monday. Wash work is easy to count. Every unit gets washed at a yard, on a date, by a crew, in so many minutes. Write that down once and most questions about the business have an answer. Leave it spread across a whiteboard, a text thread and a spreadsheet, and you’re guessing.
1. Revenue by the week you did the work
Go by the week the units were washed, and leave invoice dates and deposits out of it. That’s the only version you can hold up against that week’s labor, fuel and hours.
Watch for the week that looks slow because three yards haven’t been invoiced yet. In your accounting software you’ll see a dip, then a spike the week after, and neither one happened. Keep work you haven’t billed yet as its own number next to the weekly figure. Then a quiet week and an unbilled week stop looking the same.
2. Units, stops and units per stop
Units washed is your volume. Stops is how many times a truck had to drive somewhere to get it. Divide units by stops and you have units per stop, which tells you how tight your routes are. A night of eight-unit stops and a night of two-unit stops can bill the same and earn very different money once you count the driving. There’s more on that in route density.
3. Revenue per unit
Revenue divided by units. It moves when your mix changes (more tractors, fewer trailers), when add-ons get sold or forgotten, and when rates go up. Follow it for six months and you’ll see whether last spring’s price increase stuck or slipped away through discounts and old rate cards.
4. Minutes per unit
This is how long a unit takes, worked out from time on site. It’s the cost side of the business in one number. Two yards with the same trucks and the same rate can run nine minutes a unit and fifteen. The gate, the water, the lights, how they park and how dirty the trucks get between washes all show up here.
You need it to price a yard and to know whether a crew is getting faster. It’s also the easiest number to get wrong. Here’s what we learned getting it right in our own book.
- Only count times you measured. A scheduled time is the plan. When we first checked our own jobs, only about half had a real arrival and departure. The rest carried the time somebody had planned. Average those in and the number hands your own plan back to you.
- Get arrival and departure from the truck. A vehicle tracker with a geofence around each yard records both, and nobody has to write anything down.
- Split it by unit type. A tractor, a 53-foot trailer and a garbage truck are three different jobs. One average for the whole yard hides which one is slow.
- Separate setup from washing. Every stop has a fixed part, like the gate, hoses out and hoses back. On a three-unit stop that makes every unit look slow. Work out setup per visit and minutes per unit type as two numbers, and small stops quit skewing the rest.
- Leave out the odd nights. A frozen hose or a locked gate shouldn’t set your average. We leave out any job that ran three times its usual or a third of it, and look at those one at a time.
- Compare each yard with its own usual. Fifteen minutes a unit can be fine at a refuse yard and a problem at a trailer lot. What you want to know is whether this week was off for that yard.
- Keep the weather with the job. Cold slows everything down. If you know it was five degrees that night, a slow week doesn’t get blamed on the crew.
- Look at it by who was on the truck. Over a lot of jobs it shows who could use some training and who should be giving it. One slow night doesn’t tell you anything.
5. Wash hours and revenue per wash hour
Wash hours are time on site times the people on the truck, added up for the week. Revenue per wash hour is what an hour of your crew’s time brings in while they’re washing. Put it next to what that hour costs you in wages, payroll taxes and workers’ comp. What’s left has to cover drive time, chemicals and the truck.
6. Add-ons due, done and billed
Undercarriage washes, aluminum brightening, degreasing, trailer washouts. The truck’s already there and the crew’s already wet, so add-ons carry good margin. They also get missed, because one that’s due every fourth wash depends on somebody remembering. Count how many were due, how many got done, and how many made it onto an invoice. Any gap between those is money.
7. Skips and missed stops
A yard that was on the schedule and didn’t get washed is one of three things. The customer asked to skip, the crew couldn’t get to it, or nobody logged it. Count them apart, keep the reason, and watch which yards keep showing up.
8. Wash quality
A customer who gets a filmy trailer door three weeks running starts looking around. Inspect a few units every week and score them. The score by yard and by part of the truck shows where the next complaint is likely to come from. Keep lateness, no-shows and damage on a separate record so they don’t get mixed into the wash score.
9. The jobs that were way off
Every week has a few. A stop that took twice as long as usual, or an invoice that’s double or half what that yard normally bills. Look at them that week, while somebody still remembers the night. Usually it’s a typo, missed units or a rough night. Now and then it’s a yard that’s changed and needs a new price.
Why most owners don’t have these numbers
None of this is hard. The inputs just live in different places. The schedule’s in one system, the units are on paper or in a text, the times are in somebody’s head, the rates are in a spreadsheet and the invoices are in QuickBooks. Pulling a weekly sheet out of all that takes an evening. So it gets done monthly, then quarterly, then it stops.
What works is writing each fact down once, where it happens. The crew log the units at the stop. The tracker gives you time on site. The rate card prices the line. After that the weekly numbers are arithmetic.
Where to start
Start with unit numbers. If every wash is logged by unit number, yard and date, you already have units, stops and units per stop, and everything else builds on that.
Common questions
What KPIs should a fleet washing business track?
Revenue by the week the work was done, units and units per stop, revenue per unit, minutes per unit, revenue per wash hour, add-ons due against billed, skips and missed stops, wash quality scores, and work not billed yet.
How do you work out minutes per unit?
Take time on site from a measured arrival and departure and divide by the units washed. Keep it by unit type, leave out the odd nights, and don’t count jobs that only have a scheduled time.
What is revenue per wash hour?
Revenue for the week divided by wash hours, where wash hours are time on site times the people on the truck. Compare it with what an hour of crew time costs you in wages, payroll taxes and workers’ comp.
How The Wash Book does it
The Wash Book works these numbers out from the washes your crew log on their phones. Unit tracking is free, and it’s where we’d start. If you want to see the reports with your own yards in mind, book a demo.