CarpetBossPro Blog — Carpet Cleaning Software

Setting Up Carpet Cleaning Software: Services, Prices, Vans and Techs

Setting up new software is the part every owner dreads. It does not have to take weeks. For a carpet cleaning company with one to a few vans, the core setup fits in an afternoon if you do it in the right order. The trick is to set up what everything else depends on first.

Start With a Clean Customer Structure

How clients and addresses fit together is covered in One Client, Many Addresses: Organizing Carpet Cleaning Customers. It helps to understand that before you bring customers in. Then work through setup in this order.

Step 1: Your Service List and Prices

Everything that gets quoted, scheduled or billed comes from your service list, so build it first. Write down what you actually sell and how you price it. A typical carpet company's list:

• Carpet cleaning per room, and a whole-house option
• Stairs and hallways
• Sofa, loveseat, chair, sectional
• Area rugs, mattresses, tile & grout
• Pet odor treatment, stain protector, deodorizer, spot removal
• Move-out cleaning
• Office maintenance

Use your real prices, whatever they are — $189 for three rooms, $349 for a whole house, $89 for an area rug, $25 a room for pet odor treatment. Decide which services are priced off the property's measurements, such as square feet or rooms, so estimates can calculate from them. Set up sales tax the way your area requires.

Then make a few estimate templates for your most common jobs. They will save time from the first week.

Step 2: Vans and Employees

Add your vans. Add each employee with a personal PIN and assign them to a van. Set up office users with the roles that fit what they do. If you are a one-van owner-operator, this step takes two minutes.

Have each tech open the tech app on their phone in the browser and install it to the home screen. There is no app store download. Have them log in once with the company login and their PIN so day one is not their first try.

Step 3: Your Customers

Bring your customer list in with a CSV import. Imported addresses are placed on the map automatically, so they show on the Waiting List and the dispatch board right away. If your list is in a notebook, type it into a spreadsheet first; it is usually faster than entering customers one at a time.

For your repeat customers, add two things: their minimum days between visits (a year, six months, a month) and what you know about their last cleaning. That last job is what future jobs fill in from, and its date is what decides when they come due.

Add access notes for the addresses you know well: where to park the van, where to run the hose, pets and gate codes.

Step 4: Your Website Forms

Put the request form and the sign-up form on your website. Requests and sign-ups land in Form Responses, and one click converts a sign-up into a client. If you offer a yearly cleaning plan, set it up so customers can sign up for it on your site and in the customer app.

Step 5: Alerts, Texting and Billing

Turn on the reminders and alerts you want customers to get: the night before, when they are next, when the tech arrives. Customers can adjust their own preferences later. Check that texting is set up so two-way texting from the office works.

Decide how you bill: auto-charge on completion for most residential customers, a schedule for plans, and Monthly for commercial clients and property managers. Ask customers to add a card on file as you book them.

Step 6: Try a Day

Before your first real day, put a few test jobs on tomorrow's board and auto-route them. Open the tech app, walk through a job, work the checklist, take a photo, tap Complete. Make sure the invoice looks right. Fix anything that looks off in the service list now, not in front of a customer.

If you want to see a fully-stocked setup before building your own, the live demo at my.carpetbosspro.com/demo.html is a sample carpet cleaning company you can click around with no signup, as covered in Testing Carpet Cleaning Software With the Live Demo Before You Sign Up.

What Can Wait

Not everything has to be perfect on day one. Tags, custom fields, saved views and reports can be added as you go. Access notes for customers you have not seen in a year can be filled in when they come due. Get the services, vans, techs and customers right, and the rest will follow.

To see how all of the pieces fit together, return to the CarpetBossPro carpet cleaning software page.