CarpetBossPro Blog — Carpet Cleaning Software

Moving a Carpet Cleaning Company Off Paper, Whiteboards and the Notebook in the Van

Paper is not the enemy. Plenty of carpet cleaning companies have run for years on a wall calendar, a stack of carbon-copy tickets and a notebook that rides on the dashboard. The trouble starts when the business grows past what one person can remember. A second van, a few commercial accounts, a list of customers who were due last month — and suddenly paper is costing you jobs.

Why Paper Stops Working

If you are still figuring out what software actually does, start with What Carpet Cleaning Software Is and What It Actually Does All Day. This article is about the move itself.

Paper breaks down in a few predictable places:

• Repeat customers fall through. A notebook does not tap you on the shoulder when a family is due for their yearly cleaning. They wait, then call whoever shows up first on their phone.
• The ticket and the job do not match. “3 rooms” on paper turns into an argument about whether the hallway counted.
• Add-ons go missing. The pet odor treatment was mentioned on the phone, but it never made it onto the ticket, so it was not done or not billed.
• Only one person knows the schedule. When the owner is in a house with a wand in hand, nobody else can answer “when are you coming?”
• Invoices wait for the weekend. Paper tickets pile up on the seat and get billed when somebody has time.

What Each Piece of Paper Becomes

It helps to map what you use now to where it lives in software:

• The wall calendar becomes the dispatch board, with jobs by day and van.
• The paper ticket becomes the carpet job details on the job: rooms, square feet, carpet type, method, add-ons and access notes.
• The notebook of customers becomes the client list, with every address and its history.
• The “call these people” list becomes the Waiting List, which fills itself from repeat customers who came due.
• The receipt book becomes invoices, card on file and online payment.
• The sticky note with the gate code becomes an access note on the address.

Move the Customer List First

Do not start by entering this week's jobs. Start with your customers. If they live in a spreadsheet or an old system, a CSV import brings them over, and the addresses are placed on the map automatically. If they live in a notebook, typing them into a simple spreadsheet first and then importing is often faster than entering them one at a time. The import step is covered in Importing Your Customer List Into Carpet Cleaning Software With a CSV.

Once your customers are in, add what you know about their last cleaning. If you know the Hendersons get their living room, three bedrooms and stairs done every spring, put that on their last job and set their repeat cleaning to a year. Every future job at that house fills in from it.

Then Move the Schedule

Pick a start date, ideally the beginning of a week. From that day on, every new booking goes into the software and nowhere else. Jobs already written on paper for the next week or two can be entered as you go, or all at once on a slow afternoon.

The rule that makes this work is simple: one place. If some jobs live on the calendar and some live in the software, you have two schedules, and two schedules are worse than one paper one.

Put the Techs on Their Phones

The tech app runs in the browser on iPhone and Android and installs to the home screen, so there is nothing to download from an app store. Give each tech a personal PIN, assign them to a van, and ride along for the first morning. Show them how to read the job card, tap navigation, work the checklist, take before and after photos and tap Complete.

If a tech wants paper in the van for the first week, print the route sheet from the dispatch board. It is a reasonable bridge, and most techs drop it once they see the phone has more on it than the sheet does.

Let the Old Paper Retire Slowly

Keep the old notebooks for a season. You will look things up in them now and then, and each time you do, copy the useful part into the customer's record — a note about a tricky stain, a preferred day, a gate code. By the following year you will not need them at all.

The point of moving off paper is not to have prettier records. It is to stop losing repeat work, stop arguing about what was on the job, and get paid the day the job is done. To see the full picture of what replaces the paper, go back to the CarpetBossPro carpet cleaning software page.