PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Porta Potty Rental Software

Getting Set Up on Porta Potty Rental Software in One Day

New software can feel like a project that will eat a month. It doesn't have to. Once you've picked a plan, as covered in Porta Potty Rental Software Pricing: What $59, $89 and $199 a Month Get You, most portable toilet companies can get set up in a day and run real jobs the next morning. Here's a plan, hour by hour.

Morning: Company Basics and Your Service List

Start with your company information: name, contact details and logo, so invoices and texts look like they come from you. Set your sales tax for the places you work.

Then build your service list: everything you sell, with prices. Typical entries include a delivery, weekly service on a Standard, weekly service on a Deluxe Flushing unit, an extra pump-out, a pickup, and rentals with the days included and a per-day rate after. Give each recurring service its minimum days between visits, usually 7 for weekly. This list is what you'll use on jobs, estimates and invoices, so take your time.

Name services the way your customers would read them on an invoice. "Weekly Service - Standard Unit" is clearer than an internal code. If you charge differently for construction and events, it's fine to have separate services for each; the point is that every price you quote has a matching service in the list.

Late Morning: Import Your Customers

Export your customer list from your spreadsheet or old system as a CSV and import it. Spot-check a few customers after. Add tags such as Contractor, Events and Homeowner as you go, or come back to them later. The import itself is covered in Importing Your Customer List From a CSV File.

Midday: Active Sites and Units

This is the most important part of the day. Go through every site that has units on it right now. For each:

• Make sure the site exists under the right client, with site contacts and gate or access notes.
• Add the units: type, quantity, unit numbers and placement notes.
• Add the weekly service if the site gets one.
• For rentals, enter the delivered date and the rental terms.

Work from your current route sheets and tick off each site as you go. When you're done, the Waiting List map should show every active site, colored by whether it's due.

If you have a lot of sites, split the work. One person enters contractor sites while another enters homeowner and event rentals. Ask a driver to sit with you for an hour to fill in placement notes and gate codes from memory; that knowledge is the hardest thing to rebuild later, and it's what makes a new driver's first day on a route go smoothly.

Afternoon: Employees and Trucks

Add your employees and give each one a personal PIN. Add your trucks and assign drivers to them. Set up office users with roles for anyone else in the office. Have each driver open the driver app on their phone's browser, sign in with the company login and their PIN, and install it to their home screen.

Late Afternoon: Build Tomorrow

Open the Waiting List and look at what's due. Assign tomorrow's jobs to trucks, then go to the dispatch board and auto-route each truck Closest First or Furthest First from the yard. Adjust by hand where you know better. Check the totals of stops and dollars per service to make sure the trucks are balanced.

Don't try to make tomorrow perfect. The first day is about proving the flow: jobs come off the Waiting List, land on a truck, show on the driver's phone and turn into invoices when completed. If one truck ends up a little heavy, you'll fix it on day two with real feedback from the drivers.

End of Day: Billing Settings

Decide which customers are Monthly. Add cards on file you already have permission to keep, or send customers to the customer app to add their own. Decide whether cards are charged on completion or on a schedule.

The Next Morning

Drivers sign in and see their jobs in route order. Walk each one through a stop: Map, Start, photo, Complete. Keep your old route sheet in the truck as a backup for the first few days. Watch the office map as crew GPS shows the trucks moving and jobs completing.

What Can Wait

You don't need everything on day one. Customer alerts, the customer app, website forms, estimates and custom fields can all be added over the next week or two. Get the core right first: services, active sites, units, people and trucks.

A Day Well Spent

One focused day gets you off the whiteboard and onto a system that remembers for you. For how the pieces you just set up work together, see the porta potty rental software overview.