PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Porta Potty Rental Software

Clients and Job Sites: How Porta Potty Rental Software Organizes Customers

A homeowner has one address. A general contractor might have eight. If your software treats every customer as one address, the contractor ends up as eight separate customers or one customer with a mess of notes. Monthly Accounts: One Statement for Every Site a Customer Rents At showed why the difference matters for billing. This article covers the structure itself.

Clients and Sites

PortaPottyBossPro separates the client, the person or company who pays, from the job site, the place the units go. One client can have many job sites. Each site has its own address, its own contacts, its own gate and access notes, and its own jobs and units.

For a homeowner, that's one client with one site. For a contractor, it's one client with a site for every project. For a property manager, it's one client with a site for each property.

Site Contacts

The person who pays the bill is usually not the person on site. A contractor's office manager pays the invoice; the superintendent at each project knows where the units should go. Site contacts let you keep the right person on each site, with their phone number, so the driver or the office can reach them about that site directly.

Keep site contacts current. Construction projects change hands between phases, and last month's superintendent may be on a different job.

For events, the site contact is often a vendor coordinator or a venue manager rather than the person who booked. Get their number at booking, because on event day they're the one who knows where the units should go and when the truck can get in.

Gate and Access Notes

Gate codes, lockbox combinations, which entrance to use, what time the site opens, where trucks can and can't go. These live on the site as gate and access notes, so every driver who goes there sees them. When the code changes, update it once on the site and every future job has the new one.

Tags

Tags group clients the way you think about them: Contractor, Events, Homeowner, or anything else that fits your business. Tags make it easy to pull up all your contractors, or all your event customers, when you want to look at that part of the business or send a seasonal note.

Use a small set of tags and use them the same way every time. Three or four tags everyone in the office understands beat twenty tags nobody remembers. If a tag isn't helping you find or sort customers, drop it.

Custom Fields

Every company has a few things it tracks that no one else does: a purchase order number a big contractor requires, a permit number for an event, a preferred billing contact. Custom fields hold those on the client, so they don't end up buried in a notes box.

Importing Your Existing Customers

You don't have to type your customer list in by hand. PortaPottyBossPro takes a CSV import of an existing customer list, from a spreadsheet or another system that can export one. The details of preparing the file are in Importing Your Customer List From a CSV File.

Watch for Duplicates

The most common mess in any customer list is duplicates: the same contractor entered twice under slightly different names, or a new client created for each new project instead of a new site under the existing client. Duplicates split a customer's history and can confuse monthly statements. Before creating a new client, search for the existing one. If it's a new project for a known customer, add a site.

How Sites Connect to Everything Else

The site is where the work lives. Units, placement notes and service frequency are on the site's jobs. The Waiting List shows due sites on the map. The driver app shows the site's address, units and access notes on each card. Invoices carry sales tax per site, and monthly statements label each line with the site address. Getting the client and site structure right is what makes all of that work.

Reports

Once your clients and sites are organized, reports give you a view of the business across them. Use them to see where your work is and how it's trending.

Reports are only as good as the records under them. If the same contractor is in the system three times, or sites are missing their tags, the numbers will be split and misleading. Clean structure up front pays off every time you look at a report later.

Start With Structure

When you set up, spend your time on structure first: each client, each site under it, the right contacts and access notes. Units and services come next. For how this structure supports dispatch, the driver app and billing, see the porta potty rental software overview.