PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Billing & Rental Invoices

Moving Porta Potty Invoicing Off Paper and Spreadsheets

A lot of porta potty companies still bill from paper: carbon tickets from the drivers, a whiteboard of units out, a spreadsheet of who owes what, and an owner who remembers the rest. It works until it does not — until the owner takes a week off, the spreadsheet gets overwritten or a driver's tickets end up in the truck's door pocket for a month.

What Paper Costs You

From Approved Quote to First Porta Potty Invoice follows one customer from quote to first bill in a connected system. This article is for companies that are not there yet and want to be.

Paper billing has costs that do not show up on any invoice. Extra rental days that nobody counted. Extra pump-outs written on a ticket that never made it to the office. Hours a week typing tickets into a spreadsheet and then into invoices. Disputes you cannot answer because the ticket is lost. None of it is dramatic, but it adds up every month.

You Do Not Have to Switch Everything at Once

The biggest fear about switching is the disruption. Trucks still have to roll, units still have to be serviced and invoices still have to go out. The good news is that billing can move over gradually. Start with new work in the new system and let the old paper invoices run out over a month or two.

Step 1: Import Your Customers

Pull your customer list out of whatever you use today — a spreadsheet, an old invoicing tool, a contact list — and save it as a CSV. PortaPottyBossPro imports an existing customer list from CSV. Clean it up before importing: merge duplicate customers, make sure contractors with several sites are one client, and fill in missing phone numbers and emails.

Step 2: Add the Sites

Each customer's job sites become properties under that client, with site contacts and gate or access notes. For contractors, this is the step that pays off most, because it is what lets them get one monthly statement covering every site. See Site Addresses on Every Line: Making Multi-Site Porta Potty Bills Easy to Check.

Step 3: Set Up Services and Prices

Turn your price sheet into a service list: rentals and weekly service by unit type, delivery, pickup, extras and fees, with included days and daily rates for short rentals. This is the step to take your time on, because every invoice will bill from it.

Step 4: Put the Units Out There on Jobs

Add the units currently on each site to jobs, with unit type, quantity, unit numbers, placement notes and delivered date. Weekly service comes due on its own from there, and rental tracking starts counting from the delivered date you enter.

Step 5: Get Drivers on the App

Drivers log in with a company login and their personal PIN, see their jobs in route order and Start, Skip or Complete each one. Completed jobs are what invoices bill from, so the driver app replaces the paper ticket. Give drivers a day or two of overlap if they need it, but stop accepting paper tickets as soon as possible. Two systems at once is where things fall through.

Step 6: Collect Cards and Set Billing

Ask customers to add a card in the customer app, and set contractor accounts to Monthly. Tell customers what is changing in one short text: new invoices, a new way to pay and an app with their route alerts.

Run Both Briefly, Then Stop

For the first month, you may still be collecting on old paper invoices while new work bills from the system. That is fine. Keep a short list of old invoices outstanding and work it down. Once it is empty, the paper drawer is closed for good.

The First Month-End

Your first month-end on the new system is the best measure of the switch. Run through the checklist in The Month-End Porta Potty Billing Review: A Checklist for the Office and compare it to how month-end felt before.

Expect a few questions from customers in the first weeks. Most will be about the new invoice layout or the app. A short reply and a link to the app answers nearly all of them, and after the first month the questions stop.

Keep the old spreadsheet read-only for a while as a reference, but stop adding to it. Every new rental, service and payment goes into the new system from day one.

Start With Next Week's Work

The best time to switch is before the busy season, but the second-best time is next week. Learn more about moving billing over on the porta potty billing software page.