Not a generic FSM with a hood cleaning template — built by an IKECA-certified hood cleaner who performs 350+ fire safety services a year, for the kitchen exhaust cleaning trade.
The generic field service tools were built for plumbers and HVAC techs. They have never seen a baffle filter, a grease depth gauge, or an NFPA 96 cleaning-frequency schedule. So you build workarounds. And the workarounds break every time you add a truck.
Every NFPA 96 certificate takes forty-five minutes by hand — that's what we measured at Cleaning Pros Plus. Handwriting access panel descriptions, listing service points, printing photos from your phone, then scanning everything into a PDF. Multiply that by a dozen jobs a week and you are spending an entire shift on paperwork instead of revenue-generating cleaning.
A kitchen catches fire eight months after your last service. The fire marshal wants proof you cleaned the ductwork. Your photos are scattered across three technicians’ camera rolls, a shared Google Drive folder nobody organized, and a text thread you deleted in January. You did the work. You just cannot prove it.
NFPA 96 requires solid-fuel cooking to have monthly cleaning and low-volume operations need annual service. Your spreadsheet does not know the difference. A quarterly client slips to five months. Nobody catches it until the health inspector does. One missed frequency is one lost client.
You quoted a restaurant at four hundred dollars three years ago. Since then you added a rooftop access hatch that takes an extra hour, grease traps that were not in the original scope, and overnight labor. The price never went up. Without per-job profitability tracking, you are guessing which accounts to keep and which to reprice.
Half your jobs happen in basements, behind walk-in coolers, or on rural rooftops with zero cell reception. Cloud-only software locks your techs out mid-checklist. They finish the job on paper, drive back to the office, and re-enter everything the next morning. That is double the labor for the same data.
HoodOps replaces all of that. Here is how it works, step by step.
Every commercial kitchen has a legally mandated cleaning frequency dictated by NFPA 96. A high-volume charbroil restaurant needs quarterly hood cleaning. A church kitchen used twice a week for light catering might only require semi-annual service. Most hood cleaning companies track these frequencies in spreadsheets, sticky notes, or their own memory. That works until the third truck, and then clients start slipping through the cracks.
HoodOps includes a built-in NFPA 96 frequency engine that automatically calculates when each client is due based on their cooking type, appliance volume, and grease output. Select the cooking style on onboard and the system assigns the correct interval — monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual. The drag-and-drop calendar supports overnight shift scheduling, recurring job templates let you set a client once and never think about it again, and automated reminders go out before every service to reduce no-shows and cancellations.
Kitchen exhaust cleaning is a geography game. Your crews drive box trucks loaded with pressure washers, chemical tanks, and extension ladders. Every mile between jobs is unbillable fuel, unbillable labor, and wear on equipment that costs six figures to replace. Efficient routing is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between profitable nights and break-even nights.
HoodOps route optimization clusters tonight\u2019s jobs by geography so your trucks move in tight loops instead of zig-zagging across the metro area. GPS arrival auto-detection clocks techs in automatically — no manual time entry, no forgetting to start the clock. Crew assignment matches technicians to jobs by IKECA certification level, territory, and required equipment. Geography-based teams get color-coded territory maps so dispatchers see coverage gaps at a glance, and every shift starts with a van pre-trip inspection checklist before a single wheel turns.
Your techs work in the worst possible environments for mobile software — basement kitchens with concrete walls, rural rooftops fifteen miles from the nearest cell tower, national park concessions at seven thousand feet. The HoodOps mobile app works fully offline. Technicians open the job, follow the checklist, capture photos, log grease depths, and collect digital signatures without a single bar of signal. Everything stores locally and syncs automatically the moment connectivity returns. No data is lost.
Photo enforcement checklists require before, during, and after photos at each checkpoint — techs cannot advance past a gate without capturing the required image. Voice-to-text job notes let them dictate observations hands-free on the roof. Grease depth logging tracks accumulation at each service point over time so you can demonstrate cleaning effectiveness to clients and fire marshals. When the job is done, the client and tech both sign digitally on the phone screen.
Documentation is where most kitchen exhaust cleaning software falls apart because it was never designed as NFPA 96 compliance software. A completed hood cleaning job is not just an invoice. It is a legal record that a fire marshal, insurance adjuster, or attorney may request months or years after the work was performed. Every photo, every measurement, every signature needs to be stored, organized, and retrievable on demand.
NFPA 96 certificates generate automatically from the job data. No manual assembly. No copying data from one system to another. The certificate includes timestamped photos, service point details, grease depth measurements, tech signatures, and client authorization. A QA review queue lets your operations manager inspect every job before the certificate goes out. Once approved, the certificate auto-delivers to the client via email and syncs to their EvidLY compliance dashboard so their fire safety records update without a single phone call.
Most hood cleaning companies do not know their true cost per job. They know what they charge. They know roughly what they pay in labor. But the real number, including drive time, chemical costs, equipment depreciation, and callbacks, is buried somewhere between a QuickBooks spreadsheet and a gut feeling. When your margins are thin, guessing is how profitable accounts silently become money losers.
HoodOps tracks per-job profitability in real time — labor hours from GPS clock-in to clock-out, material costs from pre-loaded inventory, and travel time from route data. You see which clients generate healthy returns and which ones have been underpriced for years. Price increase flagging surfaces accounts where the data supports raising rates, backed by job history rather than gut feel. Built-in payments and invoicing close the gap between completing a job and collecting payment, and timecard hours export for payroll so your bookkeeper never re-keys time entries.
The best hood cleaning companies do not grow by constantly finding new clients. They grow by keeping every client on a recurring schedule and expanding wallet share over time. A restaurant that starts with quarterly hood cleaning becomes a monthly account when they add a charbroiler. That same client refers the steakhouse next door. Retention and referrals compound faster than any marketing campaign.
HoodOps gives every client access to a branded portal where they view service history, download certificates, and review invoices without calling your office. Automated service reminders fire based on NFPA 96 cleaning frequencies, not generic ninety-day timers. After every completed job, a satisfaction survey goes out — high scores trigger a Google review request, low scores alert your team immediately. Revenue forecasting projects your income six months ahead. Churn risk detection identifies accounts showing early warning signs before they cancel. And marketing ROI by lead source shows you exactly which channels generate profitable accounts.
Every stage of the kitchen exhaust cleaning job lifecycle in one system. No integrations to duct-tape together. No per-seat fees scaling out of control.
Reserve your free trial →From one van to subcontractors across state lines, HoodOps runs the same way.
Up to 25 customer accounts
Everything you need to run and document
Up to 100 customer accounts
Add EvidLY integration, forecasting, and churn detection
Up to 300 customer accounts
Multi-location management, advanced analytics, full API access
300+ customer accounts or multi-brand
White-label, dedicated account manager, SLA guarantee
Unlimited users on every plan. No per-seat fees, no implementation fees, no annual contracts.
IKECA CECS · CESI (In Progress) · U.S. Air Force Veteran
Arthur runs Cleaning Pros Plus, a kitchen exhaust cleaning operation that performs 350+ fire safety services annually across California\u2019s Central Valley and Northern California. His client roster includes national accounts like Cintas and Aramark, institutional facilities at Yosemite National Park, and independent restaurants that depend on reliable NFPA 96 compliance documentation to pass fire inspections and maintain insurance coverage.
“I built HoodOps because I got tired of explaining NFPA 96 to software that was built for plumbers. Every feature in this product exists because I needed it on a real job, in a real kitchen, at two in the morning.”
HoodOps is not a startup guessing at what field service operators want. It is a working tool forged inside a working hood cleaning company, shaped by hundreds of overnight shifts running Cleaning Pros Plus, and validated against the compliance standards that govern this industry.
HoodOps launches September 2026. Join the waitlist for early access and priority onboarding.
NFPA 96 certificates, photos, and cleaning records — delivered automatically. No extra steps.
Be among the first to go live. Direct support from the founder during setup.
Early access means your input drives the roadmap.