Free Auto Detailing Invoice & Estimate Template (Word, Excel, PDF)

Put two dates on it — the day the vehicle came in and the day it was released — and split the line so the preparation shows. Most of a coating job is the paint work underneath: the exterior decontamination wash, the clay bar treatment, whatever correction was agreed, and then the coating itself. As one line it reads as though the coating alone cost that much, against a bottle price the owner found online. The overnight hold is either its own line, charged as the bay it occupies, or a sentence saying the package price covers it; what it must never be is an unexplained gap between the dates. Number the visit once, not once a day, or the same car appears twice in your records.

One line per vehicle, carrying the stock or unit number, the date it went through and the service it got, because a lot wash, a used car reconditioning detail and a new car delivery prep are three jobs at three prices. Group them under the purchase order number their accounts payable expects, subtotalled by service type, so a manager can approve recon spend without unpicking wash spend. Record who released each vehicle to you: a used car manager and a service writer both hand out work, and only one owns that budget. Put terms and a due date on it, because a dealer pays on its own cycle and a detailer carrying a lot's month on a handshake is financing somebody else's inventory.

Write the length overall on the invoice and say what the per-foot figure buys, because the bottom, the topsides and the deck are not one surface and do not carry one rate. A waterline stain is scrubbed off below; chalked gel coat above it is cut back and waxed; deck and rail work is its own line again. On an RV the roof clean and the black streak removal down the sides are where the hours go, and neither sits inside a wash-and-wax figure. Name the access it needed — ladder work, staging, a hull on a trailer against one in a slip — since a boat you cannot walk around costs time no length explains. If it arrived shrink wrapped, wrap removal and disposal is its own line, and so is the spring clean underneath.

Enough that the finish survives its first week, written as its own block under the line items rather than squeezed in at the foot of the page. Give the keep-dry window in hours after a coating or sealant, say when it may be washed again, and name the method it now needs: a pH neutral maintenance wash by hand, and no automatic brush tunnel, which puts swirls back into paint faster than anything else an owner can do. After a Fabric guard / protectant, say how long the seats need before anybody sits on them. After an interior extraction, say to leave the doors open and whether the mats went back wet. An ozone treatment needs an airing-out instruction of its own.