PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Running a Porta Potty Business

Getting a Portable Toilet Business Off Paper and Spreadsheets

Paper route sheets, a wall calendar and a spreadsheet of who has what can carry a portable toilet business a long way. Then one day a weekly service gets missed, a unit sits on a finished job for six weeks, and an invoice never goes out. None of that is anyone's fault. It is what happens when the records live in three places.

Why Paper Stops Working

If you are just starting out, How to Start a Porta Potty Business: The First Year, Step by Step covers the records you should keep from day one. If you are already running on paper, here is what usually breaks first.

Paper only shows what someone wrote down. It does not tell you that the weekly service at the school is two days overdue, or that a contractor's units have been out past their included days. Spreadsheets are a little better, but they only know what someone typed in, and only one person usually knows how the sheet works. When that person is on a truck, the office is guessing.

What Has to Move

Before you start, list what you actually track today. For most portable toilet companies, it is:

• Customers, with a billing contact and phone or email
• Job sites for each customer, with addresses, site contacts and gate or access notes
• Units on each site: type, quantity, unit numbers, and where they are placed
• Delivered dates and how many days each rental includes
• Weekly service schedules and extra pump-outs
• Open invoices and who still owes you

Those six things are the core of the business. Everything else, like reports and texting, builds on them.

Import, Then Clean Up

Do not type every customer by hand. Export what you have to a CSV file, even if it is rough, and import it. PortaPottyBossPro takes a CSV import of an existing customer list. Then spend a few evenings cleaning up: merge duplicate customers, add the job sites under the right client, and fill in the units on each site.

Start with your active rentals. A customer who rented two units for a graduation three years ago can wait. A contractor with eight units out today cannot.

Let the Schedule Run Itself

The big change after paper is that weekly service no longer depends on someone remembering. Each service has a minimum number of days between visits. When a site comes due, it shows up on the Waiting List map and list, colored by status: not due yet, due now, or overdue past a 7-day grace. The office picks from that list and assigns the work to a truck and a day on the dispatch board.

That is a different habit than copying last week's route sheet. Last week's sheet repeats last week's mistakes. The Waiting List shows what is actually due.

Put the Phone in the Tech's Hand

The route sheet on the dashboard goes away too. Each tech logs into the driver app with a company login and a personal PIN and sees the day's jobs in route order. Every card shows the unit type, quantity, unit numbers and placement notes, plus a Map button for navigation. Start, Skip and Complete update the office as the day goes, and photos stay on the job. The driver app runs in the browser on iPhone and Android, and can be installed to the home screen.

Run paper and the app side by side for one week if it makes your techs more comfortable. By the second week most crews stop reaching for the clipboard.

Billing Is Where You Feel It

The first month on a real system is often the first month every extra rental day gets billed. When a unit is delivered, the date goes on the job. If the rental includes a set number of days and the unit stays longer, the lists show it plainly, for example "Out since 10/3 (12 days, 4 extra)", and the extra days are added to the invoice automatically. Completed jobs can charge the card on file and create the invoice from the field.

Keep the Old Records for a While

Do not throw out the paper the first week. Keep the last few months of route sheets and invoices in a box in case a customer disputes a bill. Once you have a full billing cycle in the new system and the numbers match, you can let the paper go.

Once you are off paper, the next step is choosing the right system for the long run. Choosing Porta Potty Business Software: What to Check Before You Sign Up covers what to look for. For an overview of how PortaPottyBossPro handles each piece, see the Porta Potty Business Software page.