PestBossPro Blog — Commercial Accounts

Restaurant Pest Control Accounts: Monthly Service That Works Around the Kitchen

Restaurants are the commercial account most small pest companies land first. Somebody you treat at home owns a diner, or a manager sees your truck at the strip center and asks for a card. They are good accounts. They pay every month, they need you every month, and when you do the job well they tell other restaurant owners.

They are also unforgiving. A kitchen with German roaches does not get better on a quarterly schedule, and a manager who finds droppings on a prep table wants to know what you did about it last time.

Start With the Big Picture

If you have not read the overview yet, start with Commercial Pest Control Software: The Complete Guide to Winning and Running Commercial Accounts. It covers how commercial accounts differ from residential and how they fit into the same schedule.

This article is about restaurants specifically: what the service usually looks like, how to set it up in PestBossPro, and what the kitchen manager will expect from you.

What Restaurant Service Usually Looks Like

Most restaurant accounts are monthly. Some busy kitchens with an active problem need visits every two weeks until things settle down, then go back to monthly. A typical visit covers:

• Kitchen and dish area. Inspection under equipment, around drains, behind the dish machine and in wall voids, with baits and treatments as the label allows for food-handling areas.
• Dry storage and walk-ins. Inspection for stored product pests, roaches and rodent activity.
• Exterior. Dumpster area, back door, grease trap area and the perimeter.
• Rodent devices. Checking exterior bait stations and interior traps if the account has a rodent program.
• Findings. Sanitation issues, gaps under doors and other conditions the staff needs to fix.

Many restaurants also want an initial cleanout service before monthly service starts. Price that as its own line item so the first month does not look like a normal month.

Setting Up a Restaurant in PestBossPro

Add the restaurant as a client. If it is a group with several stores, each store is an address under the one client. Set each address to monthly service at 30 days between visits, and it will come due on the Waiting List on its own.

Then fill in the details that make the stop run smoothly:

• Access notes. “Back door by the dumpster. Knock, ask for the kitchen manager. Lockbox code in notes if nobody answers before 6am.”
• Service notes. “Check under the fryer line and the floor drain by dish. Rodent stations: 4 exterior.”
• Tags. Tag it Restaurant, and maybe by area, so you can filter and report on all your restaurant accounts.
• Custom fields. Store number, the owner's name, or the group's purchase order number.

Product mixes help too. If you use the same interior mix at every kitchen, build it once with the rates per gallon. The tech app uses it to work out what to load and what was applied.

Working Around the Kitchen

Timing matters more at a restaurant than at almost any other account. A kitchen at lunch rush is no place for a pest tech. Most restaurant owners want service early in the morning before prep, mid-afternoon between lunch and dinner, or after close.

In PestBossPro you handle that with route order and notes. Put early restaurants first on the day, and write the timing in the access notes so every tech knows it. The full approach is in Early-Morning Restaurant Pest Control Visits: Routing the Stops That Happen Before Opening.

Automatic on-the-way and arrived texts help the manager have someone at the back door. Two-way texting lets them reply with changes, like “delivery truck in the back lot today, use the front.”

Leave a Record Every Visit

Restaurant managers get asked about pest control by owners and inspectors. Make it easy for them to answer. When the tech completes the stop, they record what was applied, and PestBossPro keeps the application record with the products, active ingredients, EPA reg. no. if entered, amounts, site treated, target pest and the tech's license number.

Before-and-after photos show the conditions you found: the gap under the back door, grease build-up behind the line, a dumpster lid left open. Those photos protect you when the manager asks why there are still roaches. They show you reported the conditions that keep them coming back.

Rules for treating food-handling areas vary, and they come from your state's lead pesticide agency and the product label, not from software. PestBossPro helps you keep the records many states require. Read the label for every product you use in a kitchen.

Billing a Restaurant Account

A single restaurant can be billed per visit with a card on file charged when the tech completes the stop. A group with several stores usually wants one monthly statement. Set the client to Monthly and they get one statement each month covering every location you serviced.

Purely as an example, you might set an initial cleanout at $199, then monthly service at $95 to $150 depending on kitchen size and activity. Your prices come from your own service list. To see how restaurants fit with the rest of your commercial book, visit the PestBossPro commercial pest control software page.