Pool Service Scheduling and Organization Tips for the Busy Season

With homeowners across the country gearing up for warmer weather, your pool service business needs to keep up.

Every year in the spring, pool service companies find themselves in a race against the clock to get their clients back up and running after seasonal shutdowns. To compound matters, after months of inactivity, systems can begin to break down and require repairs or modifications. If the client doesn’t have the most up to date systems and adequate protection from the elements, this adds another layer of complexity.

In this article, we’ll review some tips and tricks companies use to manage these stumbling blocks, as well as some insight into why a pool service software program like Smart Service can ease the workload and make managing these types of services simple.

The Problems

Problems will vary from company to company, but here is a list of the common issues that pool service businesses run into:

A Large Number of Clients

Most pool companies are smaller operations. The more clients a business has and the larger their service area, the greater the difficulty becomes in managing the workload, even with a good team in place.

Logistics and Routing

With a smaller service area, you may be able to handle the logistics and routing of your workforce in your head. But, with larger locales, you need a better system to organize your workload and maintain efficiency.

Tracking What is Done vs. What is Not Done

When your calendar has 200 pool openings scheduled for a week, five two-man crews, and one person managing scheduling, dispatching, and customer interactions, something will inevitably get lost in all the chaos.

Tracking New Work Generated from Regular Services

On top of the standard services you offer during this busy season, chances are you will need to do some repair work as well. This complicates matters by adding more in-depth services that require additional follow-ups and visits to a client’s site.

Cancelling, Skipping, and Postponing Services

Client schedules and your company schedule may not always line up. This means you will need to track what work that got paused, cancelled altogether, or just skipped for the time being.

Home-Brewed Solutions

Many companies resort to using a mixture of free-to-use options to manage pool appointments. These include Google Calendar and Google Sheets. Some businesses opt for Microsoft Office products such as Outlook and Excel. Coupled with these software solutions, they have physical work orders, checklists, and other documentation. 

These solutions work great when your operation is small and you can get by having a decentralized system with no built-in relationships between jobs (which means you need to do searches across multiple systems to find the data you might need at any given time). If you work in a large area or want to provide better routes for your field technicians, you can use services like Bing Maps or Google Maps and manually organize your routes. 

Smart Service Solutions

With a growing business, you should always be looking for a better way to do business. This is where Smart Service can come in. Smart Service offers a centralized system, and includes different modules that allow you to handle all of the aforementioned problems and drawbacks.  

Smart Service will link to your current QuickBooks file and allow you to have a high level of integration between your scheduling software and your accounting software. This helps close some of the gaps between doing the work and getting paid for it. Smart Service makes managing a large customer list easy, as you can access every record you have for a customer, from either the office or from the field.

The scheduling board in Smart Service will show you the real time status of technicians on their jobs, allowing you to quickly and easily move jobs around on the fly (including unassigned jobs that have been on a waiting list for two months while a special order part is being manufactured and shipped). You can manage any cancellations, skipped dates, or postponements from a single screen in Smart Service while you process completed jobs and generate invoices for them. You’ll also have a history record of what happened on a specific date for a specific customer.

If a season-opening job goes sideways and additional work is needed, it is easy for a technician to draft a quote or work order from the Smart Service mobile app, which can then be processed by the office as needed. If you have many jobs spread across the area, you also have access to the Smart Service routing module, which allows you to generate optimized routes. These lead a technician from a designated starting location to all of their service addresses in the most logical order possible.

Final Notes

Whether you want to branch out into a new software like Smart Service, or just need pointers on how to manage some individual apps and solutions, we hope this article has given you some insight and will help guide you down the right path for your business.