PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Porta Potty Rental Software

Replacing Paper Tickets and the Yard Whiteboard With Porta Potty Rental Software

Walk into a lot of portable toilet yards and you'll find the same setup: a whiteboard with truck numbers down the side, a clipboard of service tickets, a pad of carbon invoices and a phone full of texts with gate codes. It's a system, and it has run plenty of good companies. If you've grown past it, the last article, Porta Potty Rental Software for Multi-Truck Companies With an Office, showed where coordination breaks. This one is about actually making the switch.

What the Whiteboard Does Well, and Where It Fails

The whiteboard is fast and everyone can see it. That's its strength. Its weakness is that it only shows today. It can't tell you which weekly services are coming due on Thursday, which units have been out past their rental, or which customer hasn't paid since August. It also can't leave the yard. Once a driver pulls out, the board stays behind.

Paper tickets have a similar problem. They capture what happened, but only after someone types them up. A ticket that falls between the seats is a service that never gets billed.

What Replaces What

It helps to map each paper tool to its replacement, so the crew knows exactly what changes:

• The whiteboard becomes the Scheduled List, the dispatch board, with jobs by day and by truck, and the Waiting List for everything not yet scheduled.
• The service ticket becomes the job card in the driver app, with Start, Skip and Complete, notes and photos.
• The carbon invoice becomes the invoice created when a job is completed, with sales tax per site.
• The gate-code text becomes the gate and access note on the job site, shown to every driver who goes there.
• The "who's due this week" list becomes the Waiting List, where weekly services come back on their own based on each service's minimum days between visits.

Start With the Sites That Have Units Out

The most important information on your old system is what's sitting where. Before anything else, get every active site into the software with the units on it: type, quantity, unit numbers and placement notes. If you have a customer list in a spreadsheet, the CSV import gets the clients in, and you add jobs and units from there.

Once the units are in, the Waiting List starts to be useful. Every weekly service and pickup shows up as a pin, colored by whether it's not due yet, due now or overdue.

Run Paper and Software Side by Side for a Few Days

Most companies don't switch overnight, and they shouldn't. For the first few days, build the dispatch board in the software and still write the board in the yard. Drivers run their jobs from the driver app, but keep a paper backup in the truck. Once a few days in a row match, erase the board.

The driver app works in the phone's browser on iPhone and Android, and installs to the home screen. Each driver signs in with the company login and a personal PIN. Spend ten minutes with each driver on the first morning: open the app, find the first job, tap Map, tap Start, take a photo, tap Complete. That's most of what they'll do all day.

What the Crew Notices First

Drivers usually notice the placement notes first. Instead of a sticky note saying "Smith job — behind garage", each card shows the units and where they go under the address. They also stop getting calls from the office asking whether a stop is done, because the office sees Start and Complete as they happen, and crew GPS shows on the office map.

The office notices that invoices stop piling up. Completing a job creates the invoice, and a card on file can be charged right then. Extra rental days are added automatically when a unit stays out past the days included.

Common Snags When Leaving Paper

Two things trip people up. The first is half-entered sites: a site that's in the software but missing its units or its weekly service, so it never shows as due. Check your Waiting List against your last paper route sheet the first week. The second is drivers who complete jobs in the app at the end of the day instead of at each stop. That delays the customer's arrived text and the invoice, and it hides where the truck actually is. A short reminder usually fixes it.

The End Result

When the switch is done, the yard looks the same and the trucks run the same routes. What changes is that the information travels with the job instead of living on the wall. For the full set of tools that replace the whiteboard, go back to the porta potty rental software overview.