Weekly Service in Porta Potty Rental Software: Sites That Come Due on Their Own
Weekly service is the backbone of most portable toilet companies. Deliveries bring in new customers; weekly service keeps them. Rentals, as we saw in Extra Rental Days: Billing the Days a Unit Stays Past the Rental, are a big part of the money. This article is the overview of how porta potty rental software handles the regular service that keeps those rentals running.
The Old Way: A Route Sheet by Day
Without software, weekly service usually lives on a route sheet: Monday's sites, Tuesday's sites, and so on. It works until something moves. A holiday pushes everything a day. A customer asks for an extra pump-out. A truck breaks down and Thursday's sites get done on Friday. Now the route sheet is wrong, and the next week someone has to fix it by hand or the site gets serviced too early or too late.
The route sheet also can't tell you what's been missed. If Tuesday's driver skipped a site because a delivery truck was blocking the units, the sheet still says Tuesday, and the site waits another full week unless someone remembers. That's how a construction customer ends up with a unit nobody wants to use, and how you lose the account to the next company that calls.
The Software Way: Minimum Days Between Visits
PortaPottyBossPro takes a different approach. Each service has a minimum number of days between visits. For weekly service that's typically 7. When a service is completed, the site drops off the Waiting List. When the minimum days have passed, it comes back on its own, ready to be scheduled.
That means the schedule follows the work that was actually done. If a site was serviced a day late, it comes due a day later. Nobody has to rewrite next week's route sheet because this week ran long.
Due, Due Now and Overdue
On the Waiting List map, service pins are colored by status:
- Not due yet: the site is coming up but isn't due.
- Due now: the minimum days have passed.
- Overdue: the site is more than 7 days past due.
The overdue color is the one to watch. It means a customer has gone well past their regular service. A quick look at the map each morning tells you if anything is slipping.
Each pin also shows the units on that site under the address: the type, the quantity, the unit numbers and the placement notes. A due site with eight Standards and two Hand Wash Stations is a longer stop than a due site with one unit, and you can see that while you're deciding what goes on which truck.
Keeping Routes Consistent
Many customers like knowing their service day, and most companies like running the same area on the same day. The software doesn't stop you from doing that. Build each truck's day on the dispatch board from the due sites in an area, and auto-route Closest First or Furthest First from the yard. Because sites come due on a steady cycle, the same sites tend to cluster on the same days naturally.
Some sites need more than weekly service. A busy construction site with a big crew might need two visits a week, and a quiet site might need one every other week. Give each service the minimum days between visits that matches what the customer is paying for, and the Waiting List handles the mix. You don't keep separate lists for twice-weekly and every-other-week customers.
Extra Pump-Outs
Construction sites get heavy use during busy weeks, and events need extra service. Customers can request service from the customer app, or call the office. An extra pump-out goes on the Waiting List like any other job and gets billed as its own service. It shows on the dispatch board under the address like any other stop, with the units listed, so the driver knows what to expect.
Telling Customers You're Coming
Weekly service customers often don't need to know exactly when the truck comes, but some do: a homeowner with a gate, a site superintendent who needs to open the gate. Customers choose their alerts in the customer app: the night before, when they're next, and when the tech arrives. The driver app sends "on the way" and "arrived" texts automatically. The customer app also shows the route on a live map, so a site contact can see the truck is 5 stops away.
Billing Weekly Service
Weekly service can be billed per visit, with the invoice created and the card on file charged when the driver completes the service. Or the customer can be set to Monthly, and every service at every one of their sites rolls into one statement at month end, each line labeled with the site address. Contractors with several projects usually prefer the monthly statement.
Going Deeper
This is the overview. Route building, service frequency and the driver's day each have more detail; the porta potty rental software overview shows how weekly service fits with dispatch, the driver app and billing.
Never Miss a Weekly Service
Sites come due on their own on the Waiting List, colored by status.
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