PestBossPro Blog — Quarterly Plans & Recurring Service

Moving Recurring Pest Customers Off Spreadsheets and Paper

Plenty of pest companies run their recurring customers off a spreadsheet: one row per customer, a column for the plan, a column for the last service date, maybe a column for the price. It works until it does not. Someone sorts the wrong column, a row gets deleted, a customer goes two quarters without a visit. Moving to software is less work than most owners expect, as long as you do it in the right order.

Every Customer, Including the Ones Who Moved

Customers with more than one address, covered in When a Plan Customer Moves: Keeping the Recurring Pest Account Going, are one of the things spreadsheets handle badly. Usually they end up as two rows with slightly different spellings of the same name. Cleaning that up is part of the move.

Step 1: Clean Up the List

Before importing anything, spend an hour or two on the spreadsheet. It is the most valuable time in the whole switch:

• Remove customers who have left. If you are not sure, check when they were last serviced and paid.
• Merge duplicates. The same customer entered twice, or one customer with two addresses on two rows.
• Fix addresses. Full street, city, state or province and zip or postal code. Addresses are what put pins on the map.
• Standardize the plan column. “Qtrly,” “quarterly” and “Q” should all become one value.
• Check the last service date. This is what tells the software when each customer is next due.

Step 2: Set Up Your Services

Before importing customers, set up your service list in PestBossPro: initial service, quarterly general pest at 90 days, bi-monthly at 60, monthly at 30, mosquito, rodent program, yearly termite inspection and any one-time services. Each recurring service gets its days between visits and its price. Do this first so that imported customers have something to attach their plan to.

Set up your products and product mixes too, if you want the tech app to work out what to load and to keep chemical application records from day one.

Step 3: CSV Import

Save the cleaned spreadsheet as a CSV file and import it. Imported addresses are placed on the map automatically, so your customers show up as pins without anyone typing them in one by one.

After the import, look at the map. Pins in the wrong place usually mean a typo in the address. Fix those now, because a pin in the wrong town will build the wrong route.

Step 4: Put Plans on Each Address and Plan the First Round

Each plan customer's address needs its recurring service. Then use the last service dates from your spreadsheet to plan the first round of visits. A quarterly customer serviced two months ago can wait about a month. A customer who was already due when you switched goes on the first routes.

Spread that first round out over the cycle rather than trying to see everyone in the first week. Once each account's first visit is completed in the software, it comes due on its own from then on, and the Waiting List shows a realistic mix of not-due, due and overdue pins.

Then add what the spreadsheet never had a good place for: gate codes, dogs, station layouts and other access notes, plus property measurements from the satellite map for pricing.

Step 5: Cards on File

Customers paying by check or invoice can stay that way, but this is a good time to invite them to add a card. Send a short text or email with a link to the customer app, explaining that it saves them from paying each visit by hand. Every card added is one less invoice to chase. Auto-charge is covered in Auto-Charging After Every Recurring Pest Service.

Step 6: Run the First Few Weeks

Start using the software for real, but keep the old spreadsheet read-only for a few weeks as a safety net:

• Build routes from the Waiting List, not the spreadsheet.
• Have technicians log in with the company login and their own PIN and run the day from the tech app.
• Check each week that customers coming due match what you expected.
• Fix any customer whose plan or last service date was imported wrong.

After a few weeks of the Waiting List matching reality, stop opening the spreadsheet. That is the moment the switch is done.

Paper Customers

Some companies have customers on index cards or in a paper route book. The process is the same, with an extra step: type them into a spreadsheet first, then import. It is tedious, but it only happens once. Do it in the slow season if you can.

The Payoff

Once recurring customers live in the software, the weekly chores of sorting, guessing and rebuilding disappear. Every account comes due on its own, every skip stays on the list, and every visit bills itself. For what recurring service looks like once you are set up, see the recurring pest control software overview.