Pool maintenance and repair businesses can be incredibly busy around this time of year. If you’re in a climate zone that doesn’t allow for pools to be open year round, your busy season winds up being book-ended by openings in the late spring and closing pools down in the fall. That leaves your business to get as much work done as possible in between.
While more and more businesses are adopting technology, there are still some companies that rely very heavily on paper. They invoice on paper, they take notes in the field on paper and their scheduling is still done within the office either on, you guessed it, paper or a whiteboard. While you might be able to get by with this, there is only so much you can grow using paper processes, it isn’t scalable. Here are five reasons you need swimming pool service software.
Scheduling
As mentioned before, if you’re a seasonal pool company, openings and closings are incredibly busy. Some businesses that we have spoken with said that they prep for months, working meticulously on scheduling their openings and closings. While customers haven’t even thought about opening their pool, they call and try to book appointments with snow still on the ground and pools still frozen over.
Pool service software makes scheduling easy. You’re able to “drag and drop” appointments that you need your field technicians to get to. For days or weeks when you do have a large number of jobs you need to get to, this is incredibly helpful.
Routing
This goes hand-in-hand with scheduling. If you’re still scheduling without software, it is tough to know off the top of your head where a customer might be located. Because of that, there are routing inefficiencies that occur. Field technicians will inevitably drive across town to go to the next job, only to come back to the same area. It is added windshield time and it cuts into work that they could potentially be doing.
Some pool services software has routing functions built in that will enable the office manager to automatically optimize their field technicians’ routes. They don’t have to hunt for their customers’ addresses and they don’t need to plan out which stops the folks in the field need to hit and in a particular order.
Customer management
One key reason why you should be using a pool service software is for the customer relationship management that it provides. It is tough keeping a complete record for a customer using paper files. Not only that, it is nearly impossible for both your office manager and your field technicians to have the same information on hand at all times. With a pool service software, your field employees are able to see a complete work history record. They’re able to see past chemical readings, they’re able to see work performed and any other information that might be important about a customer’s property.
Billing
If your business performs both maintenance and repair, there are different billing rules that you use. You might charge a flat rate for the size of the pool that you’re cleaning and maintaining weekly and you might bill customers at the end of each month for that work. But if you’re performing repair work, there are parts and labor that will be billed differently than your maintenance work.
Inventory - chemical and part tracking
Additionally to handling billing rules, pool maintenance and repair software helps with inventory and part tracking. Instead of running a manual inventory every couple of days, businesses are able to track their chemical and parts usage as they go.
Want to learn more about what pool services software can do for your business? Download your free copy of the Pool Services Software Buyer's Guide now!
