PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Billing & Rental Invoices

Included Days and Extra Rental Days: Billing Portable Toilets That Stay Out Longer

Every porta potty company has units that were supposed to come back last week. The job ran long, the event got rained out and moved, the contractor forgot to call. Every day that unit sits out is a day you could have rented it to someone else.

The Problem With Counting by Hand

Rental and Weekly Service on One Porta Potty Invoice covers regular rental and service charges. This article covers the days past what the customer paid for.

When extra days are counted by hand, they get missed. Someone has to notice the unit is still out, look up the delivery date, count the days, subtract the included days and add a line to the invoice. That is five steps that all depend on someone remembering. On a busy week, nobody remembers.

Included Days and a Daily Rate

The fix is to decide the rule up front and put it on every rental. A common setup for short-term and event rentals: the rental includes a set number of days — say seven — and each day after that bills at a daily rate. Quote both numbers to the customer before the unit goes out.

In PortaPottyBossPro every rental has a delivered date, a picked-up date, the days included in the rental and a per-day rate after that. You set the included days and the rate on the job, and the software does the counting.

What the Office Sees

On the office lists, a rental shows how long it has been out and how many of those days are extra, in plain words: "Out since 10/3 (12 days, 4 extra)." Nobody has to open a calendar to see which units are running long. Scan the list and you know who to call.

That line is useful for more than billing. A unit with four extra days is a reminder to text the customer and ask whether they want a pickup scheduled or plan to keep it. Some will keep it and pay the daily rate. Some forgot it was there.

Extra Days on the Invoice, Automatically

When the unit is picked up, the extra days are added to the invoice automatically as an "Extra rental days" line. The customer sees how many days and the rate, the office does not type anything, and the money that used to leak out the back of the business stays in it.

Because the line is generated from the delivered and picked-up dates, it is hard to argue with. If a customer questions it, the delivery and pickup jobs, with their dates and the driver's photos, are right there on the record. See Settling Porta Potty Billing Disputes With Service Photos for how to handle those conversations.

Telling Customers About the Rule

Extra-day charges only feel fair if the customer knew about them. Put the included days and the daily rate on the quote, on the sign-up form and in the confirmation text. A good line reads: "Rental includes 7 days. Each additional day is $12." Short, specific and impossible to miss.

Choosing the Included Days and Rate

There is no single right number. A weekend event rental might include three days. A small remodel might include fourteen. What matters is that the included days cover a normal job of that kind, and that the daily rate after is high enough that keeping the unit an extra week is a real decision for the customer, not a rounding error. If your daily rate is so low that customers never bother calling for pickup, your units sit idle while someone else rents a unit to the next customer.

Write the numbers into each service on your price list so the office does not make them up job by job. Then the same kind of rental always gets the same terms, and nobody gets a better deal just because a different person took the call.

Long-Term Rentals Are Different

For a contractor with units on a site for six months, included days and daily rates usually do not apply. Those units bill by the period with weekly service, as covered in 28-Day Billing Cycles vs Calendar Months for Porta Potty Rentals. Use included days for events, short construction jobs and homeowner rentals, where the end date matters.

Stop Giving Away Days

Start with the rentals that are out right now. Check which ones are past their included days, text those customers, and make sure each one has a daily rate set before the pickup is scheduled.

Units that sit out unbilled are the quietest loss in the porta potty business. Set included days and a daily rate on every short rental and let the invoice catch the rest. See how it works on the porta potty billing software page.