Bookkeeping and financials for a carpet cleaning company
Most carpet cleaning owners can quote their average ticket and cannot tell you their margin by service type. Those are different questions, and the second one decides where the marketing budget should go. A three-room residential clean at $169 with 45 minutes of drive time is a different business from a $600 apartment turn or a $900 tile and grout job.
The costs to separate are the ones that hide inside a truck. Solution and spotters, fuel, the truckmount payment and its maintenance, tech pay whether hourly or commission, card processing, insurance and the software stack. Once those sit in real categories, cost per job usually lands somewhere between $40 and $70 before labor, and the picture of which jobs are worth chasing changes fast.
Sales tax is a live issue too. Some states tax cleaning services and some do not, and getting that wrong for two years is an expensive surprise rather than a rounding error.
At the end of the trial you will have one month closed properly, with marketing spend broken out by channel so the next decision has a number behind it.