Window Cleaning Invoice Template: Panes, Access, Screens

Short answer: A window cleaning invoice template counts panes, not windows: a double-hung with two sashes is two panes per side, a storm window is another, and grids change the time per pane. Print the count by elevation and story, name the access method — ladder, water-fed pole, or rope descent — and put screens, tracks and sills, and hard-water or paint removal on their own lines. State the minimum charge as a line, not a surprise.

The whole trade turns on one question: what is a window. The customer counts openings in a wall. You count pieces of glass, sides of glass, and how hard each one is to reach. Get those definitions onto the invoice and almost every billing dispute in this trade disappears. The universal header fields are covered in what to include on an invoice; the counting-and-walking side of quoting is in window cleaning estimate template.

What goes on a window cleaning invoice?

Block	What it reads
Property	Address, building type, number of stories, and the date and start time
Pane count	Broken out by elevation and story, with interior and exterior as separate figures
Window types	Double-hung, casement, slider, picture, divided lite, and whether grids are present
Access	Ground, ladder, water-fed pole, lift, or rope descent, stated per elevation
Screens	Count, and whether removed, washed, dried, and reinstalled
Tracks and sills	Count of units vacuumed and wiped
Restoration work	Hard water, overspray, paint, stucco, or construction debris — count and method
Extras	Skylights, transoms, mirrors, glass doors, chandeliers if you do them
Exclusions	Panes not cleaned and why: sealed shut, blocked, damaged, or failed seal
Terms	Minimum charge, frequency discount if any, and how payment was taken

The exclusions block earns its place. A pane with a failed insulated-glass seal will still look cloudy after you clean it, and a customer who was not warned will assume you did it. One line — “3 panes, north elevation, failed IG seal, fogging is between the panes and cannot be cleaned” — protects the whole invoice.

How do I count panes so the invoice matches what I quoted?

Publish your counting rule on the invoice and use the same one every time.

Unit on the building	Panes counted	Note
Single-hung or double-hung	2 per side, upper and lower sash	Interior and exterior are separate services
Casement	1 per sash per side	Cranks out, so exterior access is often easier
Slider	1 per panel per side	The track is the time sink, not the glass
Picture window	1 per side	Large glass, longer channel, sometimes a two-person job
French or divided lite	Count the individual lites, or price the unit as a set	True divided lites take minutes, not seconds
Grids and colonial grilles	Same pane count, higher time factor	Say “grids” on the line so the rate is explained
Storm window	Its own pane, plus removal and reinstallation	Never folded into the primary count
Skylight	Its own line, priced by access	Roof, pole, or interior pole
Screen	Not a pane at all — its own unit count	Remove, wash, dry, reinstall

Count from the outside and walk the inside too. A house that shows 32 openings from the driveway is easily 64 exterior panes and another 64 interior panes, plus 12 storms and 22 screens. That is why “how much for my windows” is unanswerable over the phone without a count, and why the count belongs on the invoice as evidence of what you actually did.

Why does the access method get its own line?

Because access, not glass, is what makes one pane cost three times another. The same 24-by-36 sash is a squeegee pull at ground level, a ladder set and reset on the second story, and a certified anchorage on a five-story elevation.

Access	What it changes	How the line reads
Ground level	Baseline, fastest per pane	”1st floor exterior, 38 panes”
Extension ladder	Setup, footing, leveling, and a move per window	”2nd floor exterior by ladder, 26 panes”
Water-fed pole with DI water	Reach without a ladder, DI resin cost, spot-free rinse, no towel dry	”3rd floor exterior, water-fed pole, deionized”
Boom or scissor lift	Rental, delivery, and an operator card	Rental passed through on its own line
Rope descent system	Anchorage documentation obligation	”RDS, owner anchorage letter on file”

That last row is not a formality. Under OSHA’s general industry rule at 29 CFR 1910.27, before a rope descent system is used the building owner must inform the employer in writing that each anchorage has been identified, tested, certified, and maintained to hold at least 5,000 pounds per attached worker, based on an annual inspection and recertification at least every ten years. Get that letter before you quote a high-rise, keep it for the duration of the job, and reference it on the invoice.

What is billed as an add-on rather than included in the pane price?

Anything that is not glass, and anything on glass that a squeegee will not remove.

Add-on	Unit	Why it is separate
Screens washed	each	Removal, wash, dry, and reinstall is a second trip around the house
Tracks and sills	each window	Vacuum, wipe, and detail; the most-noticed detail on a residential job
Frame and casing wipe	each window	Often the difference between “clean” and “detailed” in the customer’s mind
Hard-water mineral removal	per pane	Sprinkler overspray etches glass; needs an acid or a polish, and takes real time
Paint, stucco, or adhesive removal	per pane	Scraper work with a real risk of scratching tempered glass
Post-construction first clean	per pane	Two or three passes, and it is a different service from maintenance cleaning
Chandelier or high interior glass	each	Ladder inside the house, furniture moved, drop cloths

Never let post-construction cleaning be billed at maintenance rates. Silica dust, mortar splatter, and sticker residue turn one pass into three, and tempered glass with fabrication debris can scratch under a scraper no matter how careful the technician is. Write it as its own service on its own line, with the risk disclosure in a sentence.

How do I set my own rate per pane?

Time it, then work backward from a day, not from an hour. This trade loses money in the gaps between houses, not on the glass.

Count billable hours out of a real working day. A nine-hour day with drive time, setup, teardown, and a supply stop might yield five and a half hours with a squeegee in hand. If you need $45 an hour to cover your own pay, then across nine hours of cost you need to bill roughly $74 for each of those 5.5 productive hours. Multiply that by your measured panes per hour to land on a per-pane number: at 28 panes an hour, that is about $2.63 a pane before overhead and profit.

Then add overhead — vehicle, insurance, ladders and poles, DI resin, phone, software — as a percentage of revenue, not as a guess. Then add profit as a margin, not a markup. A target of 20 percent profit means dividing your loaded cost by 0.80, not multiplying by 1.20, which only yields 16.7 percent. Any published per-pane range is a sanity check and nothing more: route density, story height, storm windows, and how far apart your customers live move the real number more than any regional average.

What does a filled-in window cleaning invoice look like?

Rates below are placeholders so the arithmetic is visible. Substitute your own.

Invoice 2026-0733 · Two-story residence, interior and exterior · Job: 45 Ridgeway Ave

#	Line	Qty	Unit	Rate	Amount
1	Exterior, 1st floor, double-hung, no grids	38	pane	3.25	123.50
2	Exterior, 2nd floor, ladder access	26	pane	4.75	123.50
3	Interior, all floors, furniture moved and replaced	64	pane	2.75	176.00
4	Storm windows removed, washed both sides, reinstalled	12	each	6.50	78.00
5	Screens removed, washed, dried, reinstalled	22	each	3.50	77.00
6	Tracks and sills vacuumed and detailed	32	window	1.75	56.00
7	Hard-water removal, south elevation sprinkler overspray	4	pane	22.00	88.00
8	Skylight, exterior, roof access	1	each	45.00	45.00
9	Trip minimum, waived — job exceeds minimum	1	each	0.00	0.00

Invoice total 767.00 · Paid on site by card, QR scanned · Balance due 0.00

Excluded and noted: 3 panes, north elevation, failed insulated-glass seals, fogging is internal and not cleanable. 1 basement pane painted shut, not opened.

Sixty-four exterior panes and sixty-four interior panes came off 32 double-hung windows. Printing that arithmetic is what makes a $767 invoice for “washing some windows” read as a day of work instead of a number pulled out of the air.

How do I invoice a storefront route or a recurring contract?

Route work is a different document from a one-off house. Bill it as a period, not as a visit, and put the schedule on the face of the invoice.

Element	How it appears
Service period	”March 2026 — 4 weekly visits” with the dates listed
Scope per visit	”Exterior storefront glass and entry doors, 18 panes”
Frequency rate	Per-visit price, with the frequency stated so the discount is visible
Skipped visits	Listed and credited, with the reason
Add-on visits	Listed separately at the one-off rate, not the route rate
Terms	Net terms per the agreement, and how the renewal works

Frequency pricing is legitimate and worth showing: a store on a weekly cycle costs less per visit than the same store once a quarter, because there is no build-up to fight and the route is already going past the door. Make the discount visible by printing both numbers — the standing rate and the frequency rate — so the customer sees what the contract is buying them. Commercial customers also tend to pay on their own schedule rather than yours, which is where the tactics in how to get clients to pay start to matter.

How do I put a minimum charge on an invoice without losing the customer?

State it as a line with a name, and quote it on the phone before you drive. “Trip minimum” is a normal, expected line in a trade where the drive is often longer than the job. What makes a customer angry is discovering it on the invoice.

Two formats work. Either the minimum appears as a line that gets waived when the job clears it, as in row 9 above, or it appears as a floor: “Service minimum $X applies; panes below the minimum are billed at the minimum.” Either way it is visible on the quote and on the invoice, and it never changes after the work is done.

How do I get paid before I leave the driveway?

Residential window cleaning is a same-day trade. The customer is usually home, the job is done in front of them, and the glass looks best in the hour you finish. Walk the elevation with them, point at the two panes you excluded and why, then hand over the invoice on your phone with the payment link as a QR code.

The document you send after the money lands is a different one from the bill you just handed over, and the difference matters if the customer needs proof of payment for a landlord or a property manager — that distinction is laid out in what is a receipt.

What should I keep after the window cleaning invoice goes out?

Keep before-and-after photos of any restoration work, the excluded-pane photos, the anchorage letter on any rope descent job, your DI resin and supply receipts, and the route mileage. Restoration work is the only part of this trade that generates real liability, and a dated photo of an etched pane before you touched it is what closes that argument.

Keel is an iOS app that runs entirely on the device — no account, no bank connection, no cloud, no login, and an App Store privacy label that reads Data Not Collected. This trade bills more invoices per week than almost any other, most of them small, all of them written standing in a driveway with wet hands. The pane counts, the storm and screen counts, the exclusions, your numbering, your logo and brand color, and a QR payment link the customer scans off the screen all come together on the phone in under a minute, which is roughly how long you have before they go back inside. Photograph the supply-house receipt for resin and squeegee rubber and Apple Intelligence reads it on the device. Every hop between houses on a route is logged as a trip, which is what turns a day of six stops into a defensible mileage record. Freeboard shows cash minus tax reserve minus committed invoices minus buffer, which is useful in a trade with heavy seasonality and a slow winter. The ledger is append-only and hash-chained. At year end it exports as one file, or as the Accountant Pack: a CSV plus a one-page summary PDF. Free is $0 with unlimited invoices, receipts, and mileage; Keel Pro is a one-time $249.99 lifetime purchase, not a subscription.

Frequently asked questions

What should a window cleaning invoice include?

The property address and story count, pane counts broken out by elevation with interior and exterior separated, the window types and whether grids are present, the access method used for each elevation, screen and storm counts, tracks and sills, any restoration work with its method, panes excluded and why, the minimum charge, and how payment was taken.

How do you count panes for window cleaning?

Count pieces of glass and sides, not openings. A double-hung has an upper and lower sash, so it is two panes per side. Sliders count per panel, casements per sash, picture windows as one. Divided lites count individually or price as a set. Storm windows are separate panes with removal and reinstallation, and screens are their own unit entirely.

Should interior and exterior window cleaning be priced separately?

Yes, as two lines with two counts. Exterior work involves ladders, poles, and weather; interior work involves moving furniture, drop cloths, blinds, and pets, and it is often the slower of the two per pane. Splitting them also lets a customer buy exterior-only in the off-season, which is a very common request and an easy upsell later.

Why is there a minimum charge on a window cleaning invoice?

Because the drive, the setup, and the teardown cost the same whether the job is eight panes or eighty. A trip minimum makes the small job viable instead of a loss. Quote it before you drive, print it as a named line on the invoice, and show it waived when the job clears it, so the customer sees the policy rather than feeling ambushed by it.

How do I charge for hard water stains on glass?

Price it per pane as a separate restoration line, never inside the standard cleaning rate. Mineral deposits from sprinkler overspray bond to and can etch the glass surface, and removal needs an acid treatment or mechanical polish plus real time per pane. Test one pane first, photograph the condition before you start, and tell the customer plainly that severe etching may not fully clear.

Can I bill a recurring storefront contract differently from a house?

Yes, and you should. Bill route work by service period with each visit dated, rather than as one-off jobs, and show both the standing rate and the frequency rate so the discount is visible. Skipped visits get listed and credited; add-on work gets billed at the one-off rate. Commercial accounts also usually run on net terms rather than paying on the spot.

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This article is general information, not professional or tax advice.