PestBossPro Blog — Tech App

Product Mixes in the Pest Control App: Loading the Truck and Logging the Tank

Every pest control morning starts at the mixing station. How much perimeter mix for today's quarterly stops? How much mosquito mix for the barrier route? Mix too little and the technician drives back to the shop at 1pm. Mix too much and product sits in the tank. Product mixes in the tech app tie the morning load to the day's stops, and the same mixes feed the record at each stop.

What a Mix Is

How application records come together is covered in From the Tech's Phone to the Chemical Record: How Pest Control Application Records Get Built. Mixes are one of the main sources for those records.

In PestBossPro, a product mix is a tank mix you build in the office from your own products, with a rate per gallon for each product. Common examples:

• Perimeter mix for quarterly general pest exterior service.
• Mosquito barrier mix for the monthly mosquito program.
• Lawn insect mix for grub or chinch bug treatments, if you offer them.
• Commercial exterior mix for restaurants and apartments on a monthly plan.

Each product in the mix already carries its active ingredient, EPA reg. no. if entered, application method and rates from its product setup. The mix adds how they go together in the tank.

Working Out What to Load

Because each stop is tied to a service and each service to a mix, and each property carries its measurements, the tech app can use the mixes to work out what to load for the day. Instead of guessing from experience, the technician starts the morning with a sense of how much of each mix the route needs.

Experience still matters. A heavy spring ant season, a property that always needs extra at the slider, or a stop the office added at 10am all change the real amount. Use the app's number as the starting point and adjust from what you know about your routes. Over a few weeks, comparing what was loaded to what was actually applied tells you whether you tend to over-mix or under-mix.

Logging the Tank at Each Stop

At completion, the technician picks the mix they used and enters the amount applied. That is all. The system knows what is in the mix and at what rate, so it works out the amount of each product that went down and puts every product on the application record with its own details.

Compare that to the paper way: the technician writes the product name, the EPA reg. no., the rate, and the amount for each product in the tank, at every stop. Twenty stops with a two-product mix is forty product lines by hand. With a mix, it is twenty picks and twenty amounts.

Building Good Mixes

A mix is only as accurate as its setup. A few rules for the office:

• Read the label first. Rates per gallon come from the label, not from habit. The label is the law.
• One mix per real tank. If technicians actually mix two different perimeter tanks, make two mixes.
• Name them clearly. “Perimeter — bifenthrin” is easier to pick at the curb than “Mix 3.”
• Update when products change. If you switch products, update the mix before the next morning, not after a week of wrong records.
• Turn on Track Chemicals for every product that needs an application record.

When the recipe really changes, consider building a new mix with a new name rather than quietly editing the old one, so it is obvious to everyone which tank went down when. Ask yourself what an inspector would want to see for a treatment last spring.

Mixes Across Trucks

When you run more than one truck, mixes keep everyone consistent. Truck 1 on general pest and Truck 2 on mosquito each pick from the same list, so records look the same no matter who did the work. A new technician does not have to learn your products from scratch on day one. They learn which mix goes with which service, and the details come along.

Grouping stops by mix also helps the dispatch board. Putting mosquito stops on one truck and perimeter stops on another means fewer tank changes in the middle of the day. Route planning is covered in The Pest Control Technician's Day in Route Order: Working the Stop List Top to Bottom.

From the Mixing Station to the Record

Mixes connect the morning load to the evening report. The technician loads from them, logs from them, and the chemical report adds them up by date range. Set them up carefully once and every stop is easier after that. As always, the software helps you keep the records many states require; check your state lead agency's rules and the product label for what applies to you. To see how mixes fit with the rest of the technician's phone, visit the PestBossPro pest control app page.