PressureWashingBossPro Blog — House Washing & Recurring Plans

The Waiting List Map for House Washing: Not Due, Due and Overdue Pins

Recurring house washes are only useful if somebody looks at them. A list of plan customers buried in a spreadsheet is no better than a notebook. The Waiting List in PressureWashingBossPro puts every visit that came due on a map, colored by how urgent it is, so the office can see at a glance where the work is and how long it has been waiting.

What the Waiting List Is

How a yearly plan comes due is explained in Setting Up a Yearly House Wash: How the 365-Day Plan Works. The Waiting List is where those due visits show up.

The Waiting List is a live map and a list side by side. Every visit that has come due is on it, from yearly house washes to monthly storefronts if you run commercial work too. One-time jobs waiting to be scheduled show up as well. Each pin sits on the address, so you see the work by geography, not just by date.

The Three Pin Colors

Pins are colored by status:

• Not due yet. The plan is active but the minimum days have not run out. These are the houses coming up, useful for planning a few weeks ahead.
• Due now. The days are up and the visit should be scheduled. These are the houses to put on a rig.
• Overdue. The visit has sat past a 7-day grace without being done. These need attention first.

The 7-day grace is there because a house wash a few days late is normal. Rain, a full week or a customer who asked for next Tuesday all push visits back a little. Overdue means more than a little. What to do with overdue pins is covered in The 7-Day Grace: When a Due House Wash Becomes Overdue.

Reading the Map Like an Owner

A map full of pins tells you more than a list of dates. A few things owners look for:

• Clusters of due pins. Five due houses in one subdivision make a tidy day for one rig.
• Lone overdue pins. An overdue house far from everything else may need to be paired with a new estimate in the same area, or the customer may need a call.
• Lots of not-due pins in one area. That neighborhood will be busy in a few weeks. Plan the rig and the chemical order around it.
• Empty areas. Parts of town with no pins are where your marketing could go next.

From Pins to a Route

Once you see the due houses, the next step is turning them into a day's work. The office picks the due visits in one area, assigns them to a rig and a day, and they move onto the Scheduled List. There they can be auto-routed Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, and the order can be set by hand. The crew's phone shows the same order.

Saved views on the Scheduled List help when you look at the same slice of work every week, such as the residential rig's Tuesdays. Route sheets can be printed for crews that like paper on the dash as a backup.

For companies with one rig on residential and one on a commercial route, the Waiting List shows both kinds of work. Filtering by rig keeps each crew's day separate.

When the Visit Is Done

When the crew taps Complete, the visit is done, the invoice is created and the card on file can be charged. For a recurring house, the clock starts again. The address goes back to not due yet, and in another 365 days it will turn due again. Nobody has to move anything by hand.

If the crew taps Skip instead, with a note like “rained out” or “customer not home, cars in driveway,” the office sees the reason and can reschedule. The visit stays on the Waiting List until it is actually done.

A Weekly Habit

The Waiting List works best as a weekly routine rather than something checked when the phone is quiet. A simple version:

• Monday morning, look at overdue pins first and get them on the schedule or call the customer.
• Then look at due pins and group them by area into days.
• Glance at not-due pins to see what next month looks like.

Ten minutes a week keeps yearly customers from slipping through. For filling the quiet weeks specifically, see Filling Slow Weeks From the Waiting List: Turning Due House Washes Into Work.

Everything in One Map

The Waiting List replaces the whiteboard, the spreadsheet of last year's customers and the sticky notes on the monitor. To see how it fits with yearly plans, reminders and auto-charge, visit the PressureWashingBossPro house washing software page.