PlumbingBossPro Blog — Plumbing Software

Getting Off Paper and the Whiteboard: Moving a Plumbing Company Into Software

Plenty of good plumbing companies still run on paper. A pad by the phone for calls. A whiteboard with each van's day. Carbon-copy tickets the techs fill out and toss in a bin at the end of the day. A filing cabinet of old invoices. It works, mostly, and the people who built it know exactly where everything is. That is the problem. It only works for the people who built it.

Why Paper Stops Working

Paper systems get stretched as soon as a shop mixes kinds of work, as covered in Residential vs. Light Commercial: What Plumbing Software Has to Handle for Each. A restaurant's 30-day jetting schedule is hard to keep on a whiteboard.

The usual breaking points:

• The whiteboard is only in the shop. Once the vans leave, changes happen by phone call, and the board is out of date by 9am.
• Tickets get lost or are hard to read. A wet, crumpled ticket with a model number nobody can make out is no record at all.
• Maintenance is invisible. Nobody flips through the filing cabinet to see whose flush is due.
• Billing waits for paperwork. Invoices go out when someone gets to the pile of tickets.
• Knowledge lives in people. When the office manager is out sick, nobody can find anything.

Move One Thing at a Time

The fastest way to fail is to change everything on a Monday morning. A smoother path is to move one piece at a time, in an order where each step makes the next one easier.

1. Customers first. Get your customer list into the software with CSV import. The addresses are placed on the map automatically.
2. The call pad next. Every new call gets booked in the software instead of on the pad. It lands on the Waiting List.
3. Then the whiteboard. Build each van's day on the dispatch board instead of the wall.
4. Then the tickets. Techs work from the tech app: Start, notes, photos, Complete.
5. Then billing. Invoices are created on Complete. Collect cards on file as customers come through.

Each step can take a few days to a week. Most shops are fully off paper in a few weeks without anyone feeling run over.

The Day the Whiteboard Comes Down

There is always a stretch where the whiteboard and the software both exist. Keep it short. Two systems means people check whichever one they trust, and before long neither is right.

Pick a date. Tell the crew. On that date, the board gets erased and stays erased. The dispatch board in the software becomes the only plan, and the tech's phone shows the same order. If anyone wants paper, print route sheets from the software, so the paper at least matches.

It also helps to put a screen where the whiteboard used to be. Techs used to glancing at the wall in the morning can glance at the dispatch board instead.

Getting Techs on the App

The techs are the part of the move that worries owners most, and it often goes easier than expected. The tech app runs in the browser on iPhone and Android with no app store, and signing in is the company login plus a personal PIN.

What wins techs over is the stuff that saves them trouble: navigation in one tap, the water heater's details on the card before they arrive, past notes from the last visit, and no ticket to fill out at the end of the day. Show them that on a ride-along. Skip the training manual.

What to Do With the Old Paper

You do not need to type in ten years of tickets. Most of it you will never look at again. A practical approach:

• Keep the filing cabinet for reference for a while.
• When a tech goes to a house, have them add the equipment on that visit instead of digging out old tickets.
• For maintenance customers, set up their recurring service in the software right away so they come due on schedule.
• For commercial accounts, set up every address and set billing to Monthly if they want one statement.

In a season or two, the software knows more about your customers' houses than the filing cabinet ever did.

What You Get on the Other Side

Once the paper is gone, the changes are easy to see. The office answers questions without calling the van. Techs know what is at the house before they ring the bell. Maintenance comes due on the Waiting List by itself. Invoices go out the moment the job is done. When someone is out sick, nothing is lost.

Before you pick software, read What to Look for in a Plumbing Software Demo. For the full platform overview, visit the PlumbingBossPro plumbing software page.