PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Running a Porta Potty Business

Unbilled Extra Rental Days: The Quiet Leak in a Porta Potty Business

Of all the leaks in a portable toilet business, unbilled extra rental days may be the quietest. Nobody complains. The customer is happy, the units are working, and the tech services them every week. The only sign that anything is wrong is money that never shows up.

How Extra Days Slip

This is the first leak on the list in Profit Leaks in a Porta Potty Business: Where the Money Slips Away, and it deserves its own article because it is so common.

Extra days slip in a few predictable ways:

• A construction job runs past its schedule and nobody calls for a pickup
• An event customer asks to keep units an extra few days, and the office says sure without noting a charge
• A pickup is scheduled, then pushed for a week because the trucks are busy, and nobody knows whose delay it was
• The rental period was never written down, so nobody knows when extra days start
• Someone meant to add the days at the end of the month and forgot

None of these is dishonest. They are just what happens when the count lives in someone's head.

Set a Clear Policy

Before any system can help, you need a policy. Decide how many days each kind of rental includes, and what each extra day costs. A monthly construction rental might include a set number of days with weekly service. An event rental might include a weekend. Write it on your quotes and your rental terms, so customers know before they sign.

Decide too what happens when the delay is yours. If a customer asks for pickup and your trucks cannot get there for four days, most operators do not charge for those days. That is fair, but it should be a choice recorded on the job, not a guess at billing time.

Let the System Count

In PortaPottyBossPro, rental tracking records the delivered date, the picked-up date, the days included in the rental, and the per-day rate after that. Nobody has to keep a calendar. The office lists show each rental plainly, for example "Out since 10/3 (12 days, 4 extra)," so anyone in the office can see at a glance which units are past their period.

When it is time to bill, the extra days are added to the invoice automatically, on their own line labeled "Extra rental days." The customer sees exactly what they are paying for.

Delivery and Pickup Dates Have to Be Right

Automatic counting is only as good as the dates. The delivered date starts the clock, and the picked-up date stops it. That is why an accurate Complete in the driver app matters on deliveries and pickups. When the tech taps Complete on the pickup, the rental closes on that day. If pickups are marked complete days late, customers get billed for days they did not have the units, and that leads to disputes.

Teach techs to tap Complete on site, not at the end of the day from memory.

Talk to Customers Before the Bill

Extra days are easier to collect when the customer is not surprised. When a rental passes its included days, a quick text from the office is good service: "Your units at the Main Street site are past the rental period. Do you want a pickup, or should we keep servicing them?" Two-way texting keeps the answer on record.

Many contractors will say keep them, and they will expect the charge. The ones who forgot the units were there will thank you for the reminder and schedule a pickup, which frees the unit for another customer.

Monthly Accounts

For contractors on monthly account billing, extra days roll into the one statement each month, labeled by site address. Their office sees every site and every extra day in one place, which makes the charge easier to approve than a separate bill that arrives months later.

Check It Weekly

Add one line to your weekly review: which rentals are past their included days, and why? If units are sitting on finished sites, call. If a customer has many sites past their period, talk to them about their schedule. The goal is not to squeeze customers. It is to bill for the time they actually used, every time, without anyone having to remember.

What to Do About the Past

When owners first turn on automatic rental tracking, they often discover units that have been out far longer than anyone realized. Resist the urge to send a large catch-up bill for months of past extra days. It will likely start a fight and may cost you the account. A better approach is to set the rental dates correctly now, tell the customer plainly that extra days will be billed from here on according to your terms, and move forward. You lose the old money either way. Do not lose the customer too.

To see how rental tracking fits with the rest of billing, visit the Porta Potty Business Software page.