Recurring contracts are the business. Most owners cannot tell you what a route is worth.

• 01

  What a route actually earns

  Revenue per route against fuel, time and tech cost. Unprofitable service areas become obvious and easy to cut.

• 02

  Retention on recurring contracts

  Contract churn tracked properly, because in this trade retention is the growth number that matters most.

• 03

  Trade-specific costs

  Chemicals, equipment, licensing, vehicles. Categorized by people who already know what those lines are.

• Pest Control

  Recurring contracts are the whole business but I had no clean read on retention or what a route was actually worth. Now I do. Dropped two service areas that were costing me money to drive to.

• Pest Control

  I'd been using a spreadsheet since I started. It worked when it was just me. At 10 techs it absolutely did not work anymore and I was the last one to admit it. Transition was easier than I expected.

• Pest Control

  Chemical and equipment costs, licensing, vehicle expenses — a lot of little categories that add up in this trade. They actually understood what those were without me having to explain the business to them line by line.

All client results

• How do I work out what a route actually earns?+

  Set route revenue against four costs: the tech's loaded hourly cost for the whole day including driving, fuel and vehicle cost, chemicals and materials per stop rather than as a monthly lump, and a share of overhead. Drive time is the one consistently understated, and it is why a route spread across a county can bill like a tight suburban one and cost far more.

• What is the right measure of route productivity?+

  Revenue per route hour, not per stop. Stop count is the number most operators track and it is misleading — fourteen tight stops can generate more margin than eighteen spread out, because the difference disappears into windscreen time that nobody costs. Revenue per hour exposes the outer edges of a territory immediately.

• How should recurring contract retention be tracked?+

  Monthly: accounts at period start, gained, lost, at period end, plus churn rate and average contract life. Recording a rough reason for each cancellation is worth the effort — losing accounts on price is a completely different problem from losing them because the treatment did not hold, and the fixes are unrelated.

• What does the free first month include for a pest control company?+

  Your most recent complete month in full: categorized and reconciled, a P&L and balance sheet, route-level revenue and cost where the data supports it, contract movement, and a one-page plain-English summary. A US CPA reviews and signs it. Two days, no card, yours to keep either way.