Priced the way Garage Door work is billed
A service call / tune-up and a cable / roller repair don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Garage Door the way the work is really billed: off a flat service-call menu — a $110 service call, then priced work (e.g. $280 a spring). Tap the work, put in the numbers, and the line prices itself — no napkin math, no undercharging a job because you rushed the quote.
What Garage Door jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Garage Door work — researched to be realistic, so you can send an estimate that isn't a guess. Adjust any of them to your market in a tap.
Typical starting prices in the app — your area, your materials, and your reputation move them. You set your own; these just keep you from undercharging on the first quote.
New door install, priced out
Numbers only mean something on a real job, so here's how SideWRK builds the ticket on a common one:
SideWRK puts the parts on at what you actually paid — so the $700 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Garage Door price
Two Garage Door jobs that look the same on paper can be a hundred dollars apart once you're on site. Here's what actually changes the number — the things to size up before you quote:
- Springs — a broken torsion spring is the common call, and replacing both at once is the honest, safer way to price it.
- Door vs opener — a full door scales with the panels and insulation; an opener is its own separate line.
- Size and access — a double door in a tight, finished garage takes longer than a single in the open.
What a Garage Door job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Garage Door is no exception. SideWRK captures the door and work type and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the door and work type
- the spring type — torsion or extension
- an auto-reverse and photo-eye safety test (with a pre-1993 unit flag)
- spring-energy and UL325 entrapment-protection notes
Example note on a job: "Replaced springs only — advised opener nearing end of life."
How to price a Garage Door job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Garage Door job and tap a suggestion like "Service call / tune-up" or "Spring replacement" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it off a flat service-call menu
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, off a flat service-call menu — a $110 service call, then priced work (e.g. $280 a spring). Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Garage Door ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Replaced springs only — advised opener nearing end of life." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Garage Door-specific records: the door and work type, and the spring type — torsion or extension.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Garage Door estimate for approval. Your customer approves from their phone, the invoice goes out, and you get paid — card or Apple Pay, on the spot.
Staying on the right side of the rules
SideWRK documents your Garage Door work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: a contractor license (C-61/D-28 in California) and awareness of the high-energy counterbalance springs plus CPSC and UL325 opener entrapment-protection standards. The app flags the permit and license triggers so they never surprise you mid-job.
Garage Door pricing — common questions
How do I price a Garage Door job in SideWRK?
You bill off a flat service-call menu — a $110 service call, then priced work (e.g. $280 a spring). Add the work — Service call / tune-up, Spring replacement, Opener install — enter the numbers, and each line prices itself. Parts go on at your cost, so you see real profit and not just the total.
What does a typical Garage Door job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like new door install runs about $1,400 in the app — roughly $700 of that is your labor and about $700 is parts at your cost. Common Garage Door work ranges from about $110 to $1,400. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Garage Door job?
The records Garage Door work actually needs: the door and work type; the spring type — torsion or extension; an auto-reverse and photo-eye safety test (with a pre-1993 unit flag). They stay on the job as you work, so the paper trail is built instead of reconstructed later, and the disclosures this trade needs print on the estimate and invoice themselves.
Do I need a license to do Garage Door work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: a contractor license (C-61/D-28 in California) and awareness of the high-energy counterbalance springs plus CPSC and UL325 opener entrapment-protection standards. SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you. It flags the permit and license triggers so nothing sneaks up on you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Garage Door?
Yes — it runs all 42 trades, each priced and documented its own way. Every trade is included, and you switch between them in a tap.
Your first jobs
Nobody shops for a garage door tech. A spring lets go, the car is stuck behind a door that won't lift, and somebody is working down a list of names until one of them picks up. That's a forgiving market to be new in — but it means your first estimates get written standing in a driveway, one-handed, with the door propped and grease on your hands. The app is built for that minute:
- The six lines are already in the form. Open a garage door job, tap Add work, and this trade's menu is sitting there as buttons with the price on each one. Tap it and the description, the quantity and the price fill themselves; all three stay editable. The Qty box is where one spring becomes a pair.
- They approve it on their own phone, and sign it. The homeowner opens a link, sees the photo of the snapped spring, and types their name to approve. That name, the time and the amount land on the document and print on the invoice afterward. It's the difference between "he said around three hundred" and a record with a signature on it — which matters most on the one job in fifty that goes sideways.
- A door you have to order gets a deposit. Repairs come off the truck. A new door does not, and you shouldn't be floating $700 of somebody else's steel for three weeks. Every estimate carries a deposit setting — waived, 10, 25, 33 or 50 percent — and the customer pays it by card on the same screen, straight after they approve. Set it per estimate; leave it waived on the spring calls.
- Where the calls come from is the other half of this. Where to Find Your First Garage Door Repair Customers is this trade's find-work deep-dive: which channels a panic search actually rewards, how fast the callback has to be, the partners who see broken doors all week and don't want to touch them, and what one emergency call is worth after the lead and the springs are paid for. Read it before you spend anything on leads.
Repeat business
Every door on a street went in the same year, and every spring on those doors is counting down at roughly the same rate. The repeat book on this trade is unusually predictable. What it is not is automatic, and it's worth being exact about that:
- Garage door has no recurring plan in SideWRK. The plans that file a pre-filled job on a cadence — the pool route, the quarterly pest treatment, the monthly bin wash — are switched on trade by trade in the app's own config, and this one isn't switched on. So an annual tune-up here is an offer you sell and a date you put on the schedule yourself. Nothing spawns it behind you. Better to know that in August than to find out in March that February never happened.
- "Do this again" is the two-tap version. On a job that's done, paid or lost, that button opens a fresh estimate for the same customer at the same property, with the same lines at the same prices — credits skipped, no photos or payments carried across. Last spring's tune-up becomes this spring's in about four seconds, and you edit from there.
- The property holds what you found. Door and work type, spring type — torsion, extension or both — whether auto-reverse and the photo-eyes tested OK, plus your own note field for door size and weight, spring count and opener make. Next year you read the door instead of trying to remember it, and the quote goes out from the driveway.
- The review ask fires once, then stops. After a job wraps, the app emails one review request and a single reminder a few days later, and that's the end of it — a toggle you own in Shop. There is no unsubscribe on the customer's side, which is exactly why the ask is capped rather than clever.
- One message, one person, from your own phone. "It's Dave — did the springs on the blue house in March. I'm on your street Thursday if you want the door looked over." Written for one door, it reads like it. A blast reads like a blast.
- Whether the annual visit is worth selling at all — what to charge, why not to discount it, and the one sentence about cycle count that books next year on the spot — is argued end to end in Sell the Tune-Up, Not Just the Spring Repair.
How garage door work bills
A tap menu, not a clock. Open a garage door estimate in SideWRK and the work form deals these six buttons; tap one and it fills at the price shown, still editable. Qty is how a pair of springs, a second door or four rollers go on:
The estimate form's tap-to-fill menu, straight from the app — and it agrees with the summary table at the top of this page line for line. What the menu has no room for is an hour: the $100/hr in your shop settings is labelled there as used only for custom time-based lines, so it prices the odd job — a commercial operator, a fabrication call — and nothing on this list. There's no running job timer on this trade either. The five trades SideWRK bills by true hours get one; a menu trade doesn't need it.
An ordinary hypothetical morning: the spring went overnight, and with the door down you can see the rollers are original and one lift cable is fraying at the drum. Three taps, three lines, quoted before the winding bars come out of the truck — one estimate, one approval, one invoice.
Now the half of that ticket nobody sees. SideWRK's own pricing data carries a labor share of 0.5 for garage door: across this menu, half the money is expected to be steel. SideWRK bills 24 of its 42 trades off a tap menu like this one, and exactly one of them sets aside more of the ticket for materials than garage door — auto glass, at 0.4 — while one matches it, roofing. The other 21 keep more of the money as labor, and four are pure labor with no parts in the model at all. That 0.5 is also what produced the $700-and-$700 split on the new-door example higher up this page.
Treat it as an average, not a rule, because per line it's obviously wrong in both directions: the $110 service call is almost all you, and a $1,400 door is mostly door. Which is why the app doesn't guess. Every part line has a private cost box the customer never sees, and the Money tab subtracts what you typed and shows the estimated profit underneath the total. On a parts-heavy trade that box is the argument. The same $570 invoice is a good morning or a mediocre one depending on what the spring pair cost at the counter, and nothing on the invoice will ever tell you which.
Two guards watch the total on this trade, and that $570 ticket trips one of them. Past $500 the job screen raises a written-contract heads-up — on your screen, not on the customer's copy — with the app's plain-language summary of what a home-improvement contract generally has to carry, and the honest footnote that SideWRK doesn't provide the contract, so bring your own. Add the opener at $450 and the ticket is $1,020, which trips the second: with no license number saved in Shop, a caution names the amount, points at the $1,000 threshold the app carries for this trade, and adds the sentence that actually matters — splitting one project across two estimates doesn't put you under a limit. Neither one blocks anything. They just say it out loud before you're standing in it.
One last thing the menu doesn't show. Every part line can carry its condition — new, used, reconditioned or customer-supplied — and the tag prints beside the part on the estimate and the invoice. A reconditioned opener billed as reconditioned is a very different piece of paper eighteen months later than one that just said "opener." The garage door app is where all of it lives; adding work covers the form itself.
Multiplying jobs
Past the first month, growth on this trade is mostly the stuff you meant to get back to. The estimate you never chased. The invoice you never asked twice about. The springs you meant to reorder. These run without you:
- Stock the steel and let the app count it. Truck stock opens with this trade's own list rather than a blank screen — torsion springs by the pair, nylon rollers, #1–#3 hinges, lift cables, bottom weather seal, remotes and keypads — each with a reorder point already set, springs at one pair, hinges at six. Use one on a job and the count drops; pick a part from stock on a work line and its name, part number and your cost come across with it, straight into that private cost box. It scans barcodes too. On the trade where half the ticket is parts, that loop is the margin. See inventory.
- The estimate that went quiet gets nudged. Sent, then nothing? A friendly follow-up email at 3 days and again at 7, two at most, then it stops. Most of the time the person meant to say yes and lost the thread. It's a toggle you own — see estimates.
- You find out when they open it. A push notification if you've got them switched on, an email if you haven't — one or the other, never both.
- The balance chases itself. Doors get fixed on Tuesday and paid for whenever. An invoice still open gets email reminders on day 3, day 7 and day 14 — three, then it stops — each carrying a pay link the homeowner settles by card or Apple Pay. If you'd rather do the asking in your own words, a payment request is the card you send by hand.
- Mark the opener optional and let them decide. Any work you flag as optional shows up on the approval page with a checkbox; the customer unchecks it and the total drops in front of them. That's the "your opener's on borrowed time" conversation, closed without a second phone call.
- The door you just hung sells the next one. A rusted spring beside its replacement, or a sagging panel and then a straight one, paired out of the job's own photos into the gallery on your public page. A homeowner choosing between two names on a screen is choosing on evidence, and this trade produces the evidence for free every time you work.
Price it now
Two different jobs, one tool. Build a replacement — door type, opener, haul-away — or count up a repair from springs, cables, rollers, tracks, panels, sensors, seal and hinges, and see the number before you say it out loud. The same free calculator the garage door page runs, right here:
Inside a job it's the same calculator with one thing added: an Add to this estimate bar. Size the door, tap it, and the labor and material lines drop into the job you're standing in — plus a pick sheet you can print for the supply run. That part is app-only; out here it stays a calculator, free and signup-free, and it always will.
The paper worth keeping
The records list above says what the app captures on a garage door job. On this trade the paperwork is doing two jobs at once. One is protecting the invoice. The other is about the thing wound up in the drum over your head:
- The springs, said plainly, on every document. Garage door estimates and invoices carry the notice from the app's own trade config: counterbalance springs — torsion and extension both — store very high mechanical energy and can cause severe injury or death if released without control. The same notice records that this operator adjusts and replaces them using proper winding bars and, where applicable, safety cables, and it tells the person reading it not to attempt spring work themselves. That last line isn't boilerplate. The customer who watches you do it in twenty minutes is exactly the customer who decides he can do it himself in three years, and he will do it with a screwdriver.
- The spring type and the safety test, on the property. Torsion, extension, both, or not applicable. Auto-reverse and photo-eyes tested OK, or flagged as needing attention on an older unit. Asked once while you're there, kept on the property so it's still there next time.
- The opener notice, quoted, not upgraded. The app's wording: automatic openers must have working entrapment protection — an inherent auto-reverse plus, on units made on or after 1993, external photo-eye or edge sensors — under the federal Consumer Product Safety standard (16 CFR Part 1211 / UL 325). And then the careful last inch, which is the part that protects you: any sensor test you note is your field check, not a certification. Write down what you tested and what it did. Don't let the document claim more than that.
- The license line. The notice says garage door work is contractor-licensed in many states once a job passes the minor-work limit, names California's CSLB C-61 / D-28 "Doors, Gates & Activating Devices" classification as the example, and says plainly that SideWRK does not verify the operator is licensed. Your number lives in one Shop field and prints at the top and the bottom of every estimate and invoice, and on the approval page the customer sees. Where your own state draws its line is yours to check; the app's job is keeping the question on the paper. When a permit is in play it goes on as its own line with its own fee, so nobody thinks you marked it up.
- April, already done. Numbered invoices, the payments against them, and the spring-supplier receipts you photographed at the counter all land in the same place, and the year-end wrap-up turns them into category totals, CSVs and a printable summary. On a trade where half the year's money went out the door as steel, the parts side of that report is the half that matters.
SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice, and it does not determine or guarantee compliance with any licensing, building-code or product-safety requirement. That sentence prints on the estimates too. What the app is good at is making sure the record exists before you need it. Meeting the rules stays yours.