PestBossPro Blog — Commercial Accounts

One Account, Many Locations: Setting Up Multi-Site Commercial Pest Control Clients

The best commercial accounts grow. A restaurant owner opens a second store. A property manager picks up two more complexes. A distributor leases the building next door. If your system treats every location as a separate customer, each new location is more mess. If it treats them as one account with many addresses, each new location is just another line.

From One Building to Many

The notes that keep a single warehouse running were covered in Warehouse Pest Control Notes: Writing Down What the Bait Stations Showed. Now step back from one building to the account as a whole.

In PestBossPro, the client is the business that hires and pays you. Each location is an address under that client. The client holds the billing contact, the billing settings and the card on file. Each address holds its own service plan, access notes, measurements and service history.

What Lives on the Client, What Lives on the Address

Getting this split right saves a lot of confusion later.

On the client:

• The business name and the main billing contact
• Billing set to Monthly for one statement across every location
• Card on file or payment details
• Tags for the account type, like Restaurant or Property Manager
• Custom fields for account-wide details, like a purchase order number

On each address:

• The street address, placed on the map
• The service plan and minimum days between visits for that location
• Access notes: keys, codes, who to ask for, when to come
• Service notes: problem areas, station counts, special instructions
• Measurements like building square feet and perimeter linear feet
• The service history with notes, photos and application records

Different Plans at Different Locations

Locations under the same client do not have to be on the same schedule. A restaurant group might have its busiest store on monthly service, its smaller cafe on bi-monthly, and its catering kitchen on monthly with a rodent program. Each address has its own minimum days between visits, 30, 60 or 90, and comes due on the Waiting List on its own.

That means you can route each location with whatever else is nearby that day. The north-side store goes on the north-side route. The south-side store goes on the south-side route. They still end up on the same monthly statement.

Adding Many Locations at Once

If a new client hands you a list of twenty store addresses, you do not need to type each one. Use CSV import to bring the addresses in. Imported addresses are placed on the map automatically, so they show on the Waiting List and the route map right away.

After the import, check each location and add the details that make a stop work: access notes, service notes, and the plan. That part is worth doing by hand, because it is the part the tech reads.

A good way to do it is location by location as each one comes due the first time. The tech does the first visit, writes down what they found and how they got in, and the office turns that into the access and service notes on the address. By the end of the first month, every location has notes written by someone who has actually been there.

Measurements are worth doing early, though. Building square feet and perimeter linear feet measured from the satellite map on each property let you check that every location is priced fairly before the first statement goes out.

Tags and Custom Fields for Big Accounts

Big accounts are easier to manage with a few labels:

• Tags group accounts, like all restaurants or all property managers, so you can filter the client list and reports.
• Custom fields hold details you look up, like store numbers, district manager names or a building's unit count.

A store number in a custom field lets the office answer “did you service store 112 this month?” without guessing which address that is. The full approach is in Tags and Custom Fields for Sorting Commercial Pest Control Accounts.

When to Split an Account

Sometimes the locations look like one account but are not. A franchise group might have one owner for three stores and a different owner for the fourth. A property manager might manage buildings for owners who each pay their own bill. The question to ask is simple: who pays? If one entity pays for all the locations, it is one client. If different entities pay, they are different clients, even if the same manager deals with you.

Set it up by who pays, and the monthly statement will always go to the right place. How that statement is built is the subject of Monthly Statements for Commercial Pest Control: One Bill That Covers Every Location.

To see how multi-location accounts fit with everything else in commercial work, visit the PestBossPro commercial pest control software page.