PestBossPro Blog — Commercial Accounts

Tags and Custom Fields for Sorting Commercial Pest Control Accounts

When you have five commercial accounts, you can keep them in your head. When you have forty, mixed in with a few hundred residential customers, you cannot. “Which restaurants are we servicing this month?” or “What is the PO number for the warehouse on Industrial Drive?” should take a few seconds to answer, not a search through emails. Tags and custom fields are how you get there.

Sorting Starts With the Account Setup

Access notes, the details a tech needs at the door, were covered in Keys, Alarm Codes and Managers on Site: Access Notes for Commercial Pest Control. Tags and custom fields are for the office: the details you need to sort, find and report on accounts.

PestBossPro lets you add tags and custom fields to clients. They cost nothing to set up, and a little planning at the start saves a lot of cleanup later.

Tags: Groups You Filter By

A tag is a label you can put on many clients and then filter by. Good commercial tags answer the question “what kind of account is this?”:

• Account type: Restaurant, Apartment, Office, Retail, Church, School, Warehouse.
• Program: Rodent Program, Fly Service, Monthly Commercial.
• Area: North Side, Downtown, County. Useful if you route commercial work by area.
• Billing: Monthly Statement, Prepaid.
• Relationship: Property Manager, Franchise Group, Referral Partner.

A client can carry more than one tag, so a restaurant on the north side with a rodent program can be tagged Restaurant, North Side and Rodent Program at once. Keep the list short. Ten tags that everyone uses the same way are worth more than fifty that nobody remembers. Write down what each tag means and when to use it, and share it with anyone who adds clients.

Custom Fields: Details You Look Up

A custom field holds a specific piece of information about a client. Where tags group accounts, custom fields store facts. Common ones for commercial work:

• Store or location number. Chains and franchise groups refer to locations by number, not address.
• PO or contract number. Many accounts payable departments will not pay a statement without it.
• Decision maker. The person who approves the service, who may not be the on-site contact.
• Station count. Number of exterior bait stations and interior devices on a rodent program.
• Unit count. For apartment complexes, how many units the property has.
• Start date or review month. When the account began, or when you plan to review it with the manager.
• Key tag number. If you hold a key for the account, which one it is.

The review month is worth calling out. A custom field with the month you plan to sit down with each manager gives you a simple list of who to call each month. More on that in Keeping Commercial Pest Control Accounts Renewing Year After Year.

Using Tags in Reports

Tags make reports useful. A report across every client tells you how the whole business is doing. Filtering the client list by your Restaurant tag and looking at just those accounts tells you how the restaurant side is doing. That helps with questions like:

• How many restaurant accounts do we have right now?
• Which property managers have the most locations?
• Are warehouse accounts growing or shrinking this year?
• Which commercial accounts were added by referral?

Those answers help you decide where to spend your time. If your restaurant accounts keep renewing and your retail accounts keep leaving, that tells you something.

Tags and the Schedule

Tags are not just for reports. If you run a commercial-only day once a week, tagging those accounts makes them easy to find when you build the route. Saved views on the dispatch board let you look at the week in the way you plan it, like commercial stops only, or one truck's day.

Tags also help when something changes for a whole group at once. A new product for restaurant kitchens, a change to your rodent program price, a reminder about holiday hours for schools: filter by tag, and you have the list of accounts it affects.

Keeping It Clean

• Decide on the list before you import. If you bring commercial accounts in by CSV import, add the tags and custom fields you plan to use first.
• Spell tags one way. “Restaurant” and “Restaurants” are two different tags.
• Review once a quarter. Remove tags nobody uses, and fill in missing custom fields on new accounts.
• Do not put access codes in custom fields. Codes belong in access notes on the address, where techs see them and the office keeps them current.

To see how tags and custom fields fit with the rest of running commercial accounts, visit the PestBossPro commercial pest control software page.