Winter breaks the normal billing cycle
Most trades bill when the work is done. Snow does not cooperate with that. The work happens overnight and on no notice, the same site might get cleared four times in a week and then not once for eighteen days, and the person who did it is a plow operator in a truck at four in the morning, not an estimator with a laptop.
The result, for a lot of contractors, is a shoebox winter: pushes recorded on a phone notes app or a scrap of paper, reconciled against the weather in April, with a percentage of the season's revenue quietly lost because nobody wrote down the 2am salt run on the 14th. The fix is not complicated software. It is making it fast enough to log a completed site from a truck cab in a couple of taps that it actually gets done.
The three billing models, and mixing them
Winter maintenance contracts usually fall into one of three shapes, and most established contractors run all three at once:
- Per push — a fixed price per clearing event, sometimes banded by snowfall depth. Simple to price, but it lives or dies on whether every push actually gets recorded.
- Seasonal flat rate — one contract amount, usually invoiced in monthly instalments from November to April. Predictable for both sides; you carry the weather risk.
- Time and materials — hourly equipment rates plus salt or sand by the tonne. Common on large commercial lots where the scope genuinely varies.
| Model | How you bill | Who carries the weather risk | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per push | A fixed price each time you clear, sometimes banded by snowfall depth (e.g. 2–6", 6–12", 12"+) | The client. A heavy winter costs them more | Residential driveways, small lots, new clients you have not priced before |
| Seasonal flat rate | One contract amount, usually split into monthly instalments from November to April | You. A heavy winter eats the margin | Commercial clients who need a fixed budget line, and anyone who values predictable cash flow |
| Time & materials | Equipment hours plus salt or sand by the tonne or bag | The client, but they see exactly what they paid for | Large commercial lots where scope genuinely varies storm to storm |
Most established contractors run all three at once — seasonal on the big commercial accounts for predictable revenue, per push on residentials, T&M where the lot is too variable to price blind.
In CrewQuote each of these is just a differently-shaped template. A per-push residential driveway is a two-line template loaded in one tap. A commercial lot on T&M is a template with equipment hours and material lines the operator fills in. A seasonal contract is a recurring invoice at a fixed amount. Nothing forces you to run every client the same way.
What goes into a snow contract price
Most contractors price their season in October, which is the hardest month to get it right — you are quoting work whose volume nobody knows yet. CrewQuote will not tell you what to charge, but these are the lines that belong on the quote so the number is defensible when a client pushes back:
- Site size and surface — square footage, and whether it is asphalt, gravel or interlock. Gravel changes how you can blade it.
- Trigger depth — the snowfall that starts a clearing. A 2 cm trigger is a very different season from 5 cm, and it must be written down.
- Service window — cleared by 7am, or within four hours of snowfall ending? This drives your staffing more than anything else on the list.
- Stacking space — where the snow goes. A lot with nowhere to pile means hauling, and hauling is its own line.
- Walkways and entrances — hand-shovelled areas are labour, not machine time, and are routinely underpriced.
- Salt and sand — per application or per tonne. Material cost is the most volatile part of a winter, so keep it separate from the clearing price.
- Equipment on site — plow truck, loader, skid steer, sidewalk machine, each at its own rate.
- Season dates — when the contract starts and ends, and what happens to an April storm.
The record that matters in March
Slip-and-fall claims arrive long after the snow has gone, and the question is always the same: was the lot cleared, when, and was it salted. A contractor who can produce a completion time and a photo of a cleared lot is in a very different conversation than one working from memory.
Every job in CrewQuote carries its completion timestamp and any photos the crew uploaded against it. That is a genuinely useful contemporaneous record. To be clear about what it is not: CrewQuote is invoicing and quoting software, not a liability or risk-management product, and it does not make any guarantee about what will satisfy an insurer or a court. Ask your insurer what documentation they expect, then make sure your crews are capturing it.
Getting the crew to actually log it
This is the whole problem. Any system a tired operator finds fiddly at 3am is a system that gets skipped, and a skipped push is unbilled revenue.
Crew-level accounts open straight onto the day's route. Each site is a card: mark it done, add a photo, add a note if something was blocked. They do not see pricing, margins or the client list — just the sites and the sequence. Where there is no signal, and in an industrial park at 3am there frequently is not, the update is held on the phone and uploads later without anyone needing to remember to retry.
Reconciling the month
At month end the calendar view shows every job that ran, by day, so you can check it against the weather before invoicing. Pushes roll into invoices, invoices export as CSV in the format QuickBooks and Wave import, and HST applies automatically at whatever rate you have set in your business profile.