Window installation: profit per order, not per square metre

«Three crews, forty orders a month, two and a half million in turnover. Then I look at the account at the end of the month and there is ₴180,000 sitting there, ₴120,000 of which is already promised to the factory for the next batch. I install more windows than I did last year, and I have exactly as much money» — that is how Andriy, who owns a window manufacturing and installation company, opened the conversation.

Sound familiar? Site visits are booked two weeks out, the crews left for their jobs at dawn, the sales manager is taking deposits, the factory is shipping profile. From the outside it looks like a healthy, busy business. Then the next batch has to be paid for, and it turns out there is nothing to pay with.

The reason is almost always the same. Window companies measure themselves in square metres: price per square metre, cost per square metre, margin per square metre. The square metre is a convenient unit for a price list, but it is not where the money in this business is decided. The money is decided at the level of the individual order — after every trip across town, every carry up to the ninth floor with no lift, every fix and every callback. And at the level of the crew-day: what your crew actually earned on the day it rolled out.

This article is about breaking a window company down into individual orders and individual days of crew work. Because in window installation you do not earn on square metres. You earn on orders that close without anyone going back.

The founder's path: from one estimator to three crews

Andriy started nine years ago with a single fitter. He did the site visits himself, priced the job in a notebook himself, dealt with the factory himself. The scheme was transparent: order, deposit, profile, installation, final payment. At the end of the month he could see what came in and what went out, and the difference was his.

Then came a second crew, a store for hardware, a dedicated estimator, a manager on the phone. The company started taking turnkey sites: not «five windows in a flat» but glazing a floor of a new build or replacing every window in a school over the summer.

And somewhere around the second crew, the arithmetic of «sold for this, bought for that» stopped adding up. Plenty of orders, turnover climbing, and never enough to buy profile. Andriy had a spreadsheet of quotes, the foreman's notebook of fix-up costs and a banking app full of statements. Three sources, and the profit was dissolving somewhere between them.

«I was sure an average order left me about ₴18,000. When we counted it honestly — the trips, the strip-out, the carry, the fact that the crew went back twice to redo the reveals — ₴7,000 was left. And on three sites that month I actually worked at a loss and had no idea».

How money really moves in a window business

In window installation, two weeks to two months pass between «took the money» and «earned the money». The customer pays a 70% deposit, and that money goes straight to the factory for profile. The remaining 30% arrives after installation, three or four weeks later. Meanwhile the crew's wages, the fuel and the hardware are all paid this month.

That creates a gap the owner feels physically: there is always money in the account, and it always belongs to someone else. It is deposits for jobs that have not even arrived from the factory yet.

The second peculiarity is the costs that never appear in a quote. A quote prices windows, sills, reveals and fitting. Real life adds the drive across town, the wait when the site turns out not to be ready, the carry to the upper floors with no lift, stripping out the old frames, taking the rubbish away, and the return visit two weeks later because «there is a draught somewhere». Each item on its own is pocket change. Together they eat half the margin.

What an order actually costs you

Take a typical flat: five windows, an average ticket of ₴68,000. Here is what that order looks like once you count honestly.

A ten-thousand difference on a single order is not an error and not theft. These are ordinary operating costs that simply were never attached to a specific site. Multiply by forty orders and you get exactly the sum that goes missing from the profile budget every month.

The crew-day: the second unit you have to measure

The order shows you margin. The crew-day shows you whether you are loaded at all.

A crew costs you the same on the day it fits eight windows in a new build and on the day it drives thirty kilometres to replace two windows in a private house. Wages, fuel and tool wear do not change. Which is why a small job out on the edge of town with a healthy margin «per square metre» can be the worst day of the month.

The calculation is simple: take the full monthly cost of a crew — wages, taxes, fuel, tools, phone — and divide it by the number of days it actually went out. Andriy landed on ₴4,900 per crew-day. Now every order can be held against that figure: how many days it took and how much it left after everything.

«What shocked me most were the small jobs out in the villages. On paper the margin looks fine, and the crew burns a full day on it plus two hours of driving. Once I saw that in numbers, we simply set a minimum order value for anything beyond twenty kilometres. Turnover dipped a little, profit went up».

A free site visit is not free

In this trade the site visit is traditionally free. But the estimator drives across town, spends an hour on site and another hour on the quote. If three out of ten visits turn into a contract, then seven trips are paid for by those three customers — nobody just calls it that.

Work out your own visit-to-contract rate for the quarter and the cost of one estimator trip. Andriy got ₴620 per visit and a 34% conversion. So every signed contract was carrying roughly ₴1,800 of site visits that led nowhere. Against a margin of fourteen thousand, that is noticeable.

When that number became visible, what changed was not the pricing but the manager's work: he started filtering enquiries on the phone — by budget, by timing, by whether the site was ready. The number of visits dropped by a quarter and the number of contracts stayed the same.

A deposit is not profit, it is someone else's money

This is the classic trap of the trade. A million in deposits is sitting in the account and the owner feels the company is fine. In fact that million is an obligation: profile still has to be ordered against it, made, delivered and fitted.

When deposits on new orders cover the costs of old ones, the company is running a pyramid. While the flow of orders grows, everything looks smooth. The moment January or February dips, it turns out the money for December's windows has already been spent and the profile for them still has to be bought.

The cure is a payment calendar that shows you not the balance in the account but how much of that balance is already promised and exactly when. If cash gaps are a sore subject for you, start with the breakdown of how to spot them early.

Callbacks: the cost nobody plans for

No quote has a line for «going back to site». It always happens: a draught in the reveals, hardware out of adjustment, a scratched profile, a customer who will not sign off. The crew drives out a second time, sometimes a third, and those days are recorded nowhere.

Count the share of orders with callbacks over a quarter. If it is above 15%, you do not have a customer problem — you have a process problem or a specific crew problem. And you can only see it when callbacks are attached to an order and to a crew instead of sitting in one lump under «other costs».

Seasonality: summer feeds winter

Windows go in from April to October. In winter the volume halves while crews, warehouse rent and managers stay. Owners usually know this as a feeling, but rarely build it into numbers.

The practical approach is to put aside a fixed percentage of every closed order during the peak months into a winter fund. Not «whatever is left» — what is left is always zero. A percentage, moved to a separate account the moment a site is settled up.

«We put aside 8% of every closed order from May through September. For the first time in seven years I was not sitting in February wondering where wages would come from».

What changed once the orders became visible

Andriy pulled everything into one system: each order became its own project with its own income and costs, and the bank accounts feed in automatically. Travel, fixes and advertising are now allocated to specific sites instead of one shared bucket.

Two months later, three things were obvious. Turnkey jobs in new builds returned twice as much per crew-day as retail flats. One of the three crews had three times the callbacks for the same work. And the advertising that brought in cheap small orders cost more than those orders produced.

Not one of those conclusions needed new customers. It only needed a view of what was already happening. We worked through the same logic for building crews in the piece on profit per crew-day.

An insight for owners. In window installation you do not earn on square metres, you earn on orders that close without a callback. Two companies with identical turnover can differ twofold in profit, and the whole difference is that one of them costs a square metre while the other costs every single time a crew rolls out.

A few closing notes

• Track every order: materials, installation, travel, strip-out, waste removal, fixes.
• Work out your crew-day cost and hold every order against it, not just margin per square metre.
• Set a minimum order value for jobs outside the city.
• Keep deposits separate from your own money — they are an obligation, not revenue.
• Count the callback rate per crew, not for the company as a whole.
• From May to September put a fixed percentage aside for winter, immediately rather than «out of what is left».

Money does not disappear. You just do not see it

Money in a window company does not evaporate. It sits in the warehouse as profile for orders not yet fitted, and it dissolves into drives, carries and repeat visits while you look at turnover and square metres installed. The moment you break it down by order and by crew-day, it becomes obvious which sites feed you and which merely keep the crews busy.

You do not need more orders. You need to see which order actually brought money in and how many crew-days it took to do it — and to have your finances in order in a way that shows you this daily rather than once a year by guesswork.

Try looking at your sites differently — within the first month you will see which orders feed you and which quietly eat you alive.