Overview
This playbook covers best practices for setting up and running snow operations in Aspire, from contract setup through storm dispatching, post-storm cleanup, and subcontractor billing.
Contract architecture and setup
Set wide-open contract dates
Set your snow contract dates wide open, for example, September 1 to June 1. This is a best practice for three reasons:
Route preparation: Aspire must generate tickets before you can route or schedule them, and no tickets are available to route until the contract start date.
Early-season snow: Tickets are active and ready to dispatch right away if an unexpected early storm hits.
Late-season snow and variances: As Needed tickets aren't available for dispatch after the contract end date. Running seasonal tickets after the end date creates a variance.
Tip: To keep $0 billing months off client-facing documents, use a custom invoice layout that hides them.
Set T&M equipment costs to $0
Set the unit cost to $0 for every time and materials (T&M) equipment item in your catalog. If you add an internal cost to the equipment, Aspire treats it as cost of goods sold (COGS) and deducts that value from your inventory holding accounts on the balance sheet, which throws off your accounting.
Instead, keep the cost at $0 and use custom billing rate overrides that bundle labor, fuel, wear, and profit margin.
Choose Multi-Visit or As Needed
Use Multi-Visit only for seasonal, fixed-payment contracts, where the client pays a flat monthly rate for unlimited visits. Multi-Visit lets crews clock in and out of the same ticket many times over several months without completing it.
Don't use Multi-Visit for T&M or per-service (range billing) services. If you do, crews can't complete the ticket from Aspire Mobile. Someone in the office has to complete it manually, which delays billing.
Tip: To track hand-shoveling labor on T&M contracts, set up manual shovelers as an Equipment item with a $0 unit cost. Crews can then track billable equipment hours alongside, but separate from, their payroll clock-ins, so payroll hours don't get inflated.
Storm production and dispatching
Dispatch the lowest depth range for range billing
Always dispatch the ticket for your lowest depth range, such as 0–3 inches, to your field crews. This removes guesswork in the field, so crew leaders don't have to estimate accumulation or decide which rate to bill.
After the storm, the office uses Aspire's bulk tools to swap the dispatched ticket for the actual depth range.
Set default routes and a holding route
Before the storm, filter the Schedule Board by your snow division, sort by property, and assign default routes.
Then create a holding route whose name starts with an asterisk, such as "*Holding Route". The asterisk sorts the route to the top of your alphabetical list, giving dispatchers one central place to stage and review unassigned tickets before moving them to active routes.
Tip: Add opportunity tags such as "Zero Tolerance", "2-Inch Trigger", or "No Weekends". On the Schedule an Event screen, filter by these tags to quickly bulk-select and dispatch targeted lists of properties as a storm develops.
Post-storm reconciliation and auditing
Run the four-step post-storm cleanup audit
Run this audit in the office right after every major weather event to prevent billing backlogs:
Run the As Needed Exceptions report to find and resolve any tickets that weren't worked or dispatched.
Check for stray costs. Filter for open tickets with actual costs greater than $0. Review these costs, then consolidate or move them as needed.
Run a zero-dollar sweep. Filter for open or scheduled tickets with $0 actual cost, then delete them in bulk.
Complete and invoice. Move the remaining validated tickets to complete so they're ready for billing.
Adjust depths on per-service tickets in bulk
Instead of opening each ticket to change its billing depth, go to the Work Tickets screen, select the tickets you want to update, and select Bulk Actions > Swap As Needed Service.
This swaps your low-depth dispatch ticket for the actual storm range in seconds, so billing stays accurate across your portfolio.
Important: Name your snow division exactly "Snow", with no extra words or characters. When a system administrator turns on Snow Mode and a crew leader turns it on in Aspire Mobile, Snow Mode shows only services in the Snow division and changes the field interface for fast-paced winter storms.
Subcontractors and billing integrity
Have subcontractor crews use Aspire Mobile
Have your subcontractors use Aspire Mobile instead of the Subcontractor Portal. The portal relies on time entered after the fact, which leaves you without live data during storms and can delay billing reconciliation by days or weeks.
Aspire Mobile captures GPS-verified clock-ins and real-time labor data that feed your margin and capacity reports right away.
Tip: When you set a contact's Contact Type to Sub on their Contact record, Aspire Mobile limits that subcontractor to the routes assigned to them.
Automate subcontractor expenses
Set up subcontractor auto expenses on the subcontractor's company profile or directly on the opportunity service. You can set payouts as Flat Fee, Hourly, or Catalog Unit Payouts.
When the subcontractor clocks out and completes the job in the field, Aspire automatically creates a purchase receipt and posts the job costs to the work ticket, so your margins stay accurate.
Test your invoices before you send proposals
Test your setup all the way through invoicing before you send client proposals. Don't wait for the season to start.
Create test opportunities for each invoice type, including seasonal, per-service, and T&M. Check how your T&M contract minimums calculate and how T&M overrides display on your final invoice layouts. Testing early matters because the results may show that you need to adjust your service setup, pricing, or layout settings.
Tip: Finishing this testing before you deliver proposals helps prevent invoice formatting disputes later.
Tip: When you preview your T&M test invoices, adjust your layout settings to hide internal details, such as unmet minimum alerts or internal operator wage tables, so clients get a clean, easy-to-read invoice.