CarpetBossPro Blog — Carpet Cleaning Software

Growing From One Van to Three: What Carpet Cleaning Software Has to Handle

The jump from one van to two is the hardest step a carpet cleaning company takes. With one van, the owner sees every job. With two, half the jobs happen somewhere the owner is not. With three, the owner may not be on a van at all. What used to live in the owner's head has to live somewhere everyone can read it.

From the Driver's Seat to the Office

The owner-operator setup in Truck-Mount Owner-Operators: Running the Whole Business From the Van is where many growing companies start. As vans are added, the same software keeps working; it just has more people using it.

Every Tech Needs the Owner's Knowledge

The biggest change with more vans is that techs need to know what the owner knows. Which rooms are on the job. That the customer always wants the stairs done last. That the driveway is too steep for the van. That the red wine stain by the fireplace did not come out last time.

In CarpetBossPro, that information is on the job and the address: the carpet job details, access notes and past notes. Each tech sees it on their own phone. A new hire reading the job card in the driveway knows nearly as much about the house as the owner who cleaned it last year.

Employees, PINs and Van Assignments

Each tech is set up as an employee with a personal PIN and a van assignment. They log into the tech app with the company login and their PIN, and see their own jobs in route order. Jobs, photos, checklists and clock-ins are tied to the person who did them.

The time clock records hours on the same phone. When payroll comes around, the hours are already there, recorded as they happened instead of reconstructed from memory.

Dispatch Gets Real

With one van, dispatch is a list. With three, it is a puzzle. The dispatch board shows jobs by day and filters by van, so the office can see each van's day and the whole company's day. Auto-route orders each van's jobs Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, and the order can be adjusted by hand.

A common setup as companies grow: one van on residential during the day, one on commercial after hours, and a third on upholstery, rugs and move-outs, or on overflow residential in busy months. Saved views keep each van's board one click away. The board is covered in Dispatch for Carpet Cleaners: Days, Vans and Route Order on One Board.

Seeing the Day Without Riding Along

An owner with three vans cannot ride along with each one. The software fills the gap:

• Crew GPS on the office map shows where every van is.
• Start, Skip and Complete show what is underway, what is done and what was skipped, with the tech's reason.
• The finished checklist on each job shows the steps, the rooms cleaned, dry time, stains that stayed and the condition.
• Before and after photos show the quality of the work.

An owner can look at a new tech's first week of jobs and see whether they are grooming the carpet and putting furniture on blocks, without standing in each living room.

The Same Job, No Matter Which Van

Customers notice when the second tech does things differently from the first. The carpet cleaning checklist makes the routine the same for everyone: walk-through, move small furniture, pre-vacuum, pre-treat, spot treatment, the add-ons on the job, clean, groom, furniture back on blocks or tabs, final walk-through with dry time explained. A customer gets the same job whichever van shows up.

Office Roles

More vans usually means more office help — someone answering phones, someone handling billing. Office users get roles, so each person sees what they need. Two-way texting keeps customer conversations with the customer record, so anyone in the office can pick up a thread.

The Plan That Fits

CarpetBossPro plans are Start ($59/month), Pro ($89/month) and Crew ($199/month), with monthly text allowances of 500, 1,000 and 2,000 texts sent and received. A company running several vans with automated alerts on every job sends a lot more texts than a one-van company, which is what the larger plans are for. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, no credit card.

Grow Before You Need To

The best time to get a company into software is before the second van, not after. Hiring is stressful enough without also moving every customer off paper the same month. When the customers, access notes and repeat schedules are already in the system, a new tech can start on Monday and run a route on Tuesday.

To see every piece of the software together, return to the CarpetBossPro carpet cleaning software page.