PlumbingBossPro Blog — Plumbing Software

Setting Up Plumbing Software in the First Week: A Day-by-Day Plan

The first week with new software decides whether it sticks. Spend it clicking around without a plan and the trial runs out before you have run a single real job. Spend it setting things up in a sensible order and by Friday your vans are running from the tech app and invoices are going out on their own. Here is a day-by-day plan that fits around a working plumbing week.

Before Day One: Gather What You Need

If you are coming from another program, the export steps in Switching Plumbing Software Without Losing Customers or a Week of Work come first. If you are coming from paper, gather your customer spreadsheet or contact list.

Also have on hand:

• A list of the services you sell and what you charge for each.
• Your list of maintenance customers: who gets a yearly flush, softener service, backflow test or grease-line jetting, and how often.
• Your techs' names and which van each one drives.
• Your sales tax rate, if it applies to your work.

Day 1: Company and Service List

Start with the basics. Enter your company details, then build your service list. A plumbing shop's list might include a service call, drain cleaning, main line, hydro-jetting, camera inspection, faucet, toilet, disposal, leak repair, water heater replacement, tankless install, PRV, softener and backflow. Use your own prices. A shop might set an $89 service call, a $189 drain cleaning and a $129 water heater flush.

Name services the way customers would understand them, because these names show up on estimates and invoices.

Day 2: Bring In Customers

Clean up your customer list and bring it in with CSV import. The addresses are placed on the map automatically. Check the map for any pins that landed in the wrong spot and fix those addresses.

Then set up multi-address clients. A landlord with six rentals should be one client with six addresses, not six clients. Set property managers and restaurant groups who want one bill to Monthly billing. Add tags like “restaurant” or “property manager” so they are easy to find later.

Day 3: Recurring Work and Equipment

Set up recurring services for every maintenance customer. Each one gets its minimum days between visits: 365 for a yearly flush, 14 or 30 for grease-line jetting, whatever fits for softener service and backflow tests. As you do, visits that are already due will show up on the Waiting List.

Then add equipment for the houses you know well. Do not try to do every customer. Pick the regulars and the ones on maintenance plans: the water heater with brand, model, size, fuel and year; the softener; the shut-off location. The rest gets filled in as techs visit. For more, see Equipment Saved on the House: Water Heaters, Softeners, Pumps and Shut-Offs in Plumbing Software.

Day 4: People, Vans and Alerts

Add each tech as an employee with a personal PIN and assign them to a van. Add office users with the roles that fit their jobs.

Then set up customer communication. Look at the automatic alerts (night before, when they are next, when the tech arrives) and the reminder messages. Keep texts short and plain. Put your request form and sign-up form on your website so new work flows into Form Responses.

Have each tech open the tech app on their phone in the browser, install it to the home screen, and sign in with the company login and their PIN. Five minutes each.

Day 5: Run a Real Day

Pick tomorrow's jobs from the Waiting List, assign them to vans on the dispatch board, and auto-route each van from the shop. On the day, techs work from the app: navigation, Start, photos, Complete. Watch the office side as jobs come in done, invoices are created, and cards on file are charged.

Expect a few hiccups. A missing access note, a service named wrong, an address that needs fixing. Fix them as they come up. That is what the first real day is for.

At the end of the day, ask each tech what was confusing and what helped. Their answers tell you what to tidy up next week.

After the First Week

With the setup done, the second week is about habits. Book every call in the software. Check the Waiting List for overdue pins every day. Ask techs to add equipment and notes at every house. Look at open invoices and estimates once a week.

All of this fits inside the 14-day free trial, with no credit card. By the time the trial ends, you have run real jobs and know whether it works for your shop. The next article, Plumbing Software Pricing: What $59, $89 and $199 a Month Get You, covers picking a plan. For the full platform overview, visit the PlumbingBossPro plumbing software page.