TrashCanBossPro Blog — Billing & Payments

Organizing Billing With Tags: Monthly, Every-Other-Week, HOA and Commercial Accounts

Once a bin cleaning route passes a couple hundred customers, "who are our HOA accounts again?" stops being a question you can answer from memory. Tags turn your customer list into groups you can pull up in seconds, and billing is where that pays off most.

Different Accounts, Different Billing

Estimates, covered in From Approved Estimate to First Invoice: Bin Cleaning Quotes That Bill Themselves, often bring in accounts that bill differently from your regular residential customers. An HOA gets a Monthly statement. A restaurant gets a commercial pad invoice. A homeowner gets charged per visit. If all of them sit in one undivided list, mistakes happen.

What Tags Are

In TrashCanBossPro, every client can have tags. They are short labels you attach to a customer, like Monthly, Every-Other-Week, HOA or Commercial. A client can have more than one. You can then find every client with a given tag without scrolling the whole list.

Tags do not change how a customer is billed by themselves. The billing setting on the account does that. Tags make it easy to see and work with each group.

Billing Tags Worth Using

Start with a short list and add only when you need to:

• Monthly. Accounts that get one statement a month for every address.
• Every-Other-Week. The plan many routes are built on.
• HOA. Community accounts, usually also Monthly.
• Commercial. Businesses, restaurants, apartment pads.
• Prepaid. Customers who paid up front, so nobody charges them again by mistake.
• No Card. Customers who pay invoices themselves, so you know who to watch.

Resist the urge to tag everything. Ten tags you use beat forty tags nobody remembers.

Custom Fields for the Details

Tags are for groups. Custom fields are for details. Some billing details belong on the client but do not fit anywhere else:

• A purchase order number a commercial customer needs on file
• The name of the person who approves the HOA's statements
• A tax exemption certificate number and its expiration date
• The number of cleanings a prepaid customer bought

Put these in custom fields so they live with the customer instead of in someone's inbox.

Using Tags at Month End

Tags make the month-end review faster. Pull up every Monthly account and check that each statement went out. Pull up Prepaid and make sure nobody was charged on top of a prepayment. Pull up No Card and look for open invoices. Each check takes a minute because the list is already filtered.

Tags also make reports more useful. When you want to know how much of your billing comes from HOAs versus commercial versus residential, tags are how you split it. For more on that, read Billing Reports Every Bin Cleaning Owner Should Read.

Using Tags for Billing Messages

Sometimes a billing message only applies to one group. A note to HOA treasurers about when statements go out. A reminder to No Card customers that they can now keep a card on file in the customer app. A heads-up to commercial accounts about a price change. Tags let you find exactly who should get the message, so homeowners do not get a note meant for property managers.

Keep Tags Honest

Tags are only useful if they are right. When a customer moves from every other week to weekly, change the tag. When an HOA drops to a few homes and switches to per-visit billing, remove the Monthly tag. Make tag updates part of the same step as plan changes, so the two never drift apart.

When you first set up tags, consider tagging customers during your CSV import, if your spreadsheet already has a column for plan or account type. That saves tagging hundreds of customers by hand.

Agree on Tag Names as a Team

If two people in the office tag accounts, they need to use the same words. "HOA" and "Homeowners Assn" split one group into two, and half your HOA accounts disappear from the filter. Write a short list of approved tags, share it with everyone who works in the office, and fix any stray variations as soon as you spot them. Consistent names are what make tags worth having.

Review the approved list once a year and retire tags nobody has used in months. A shorter list is easier to apply correctly, and easier for a new office hire to learn on their first day.

The same goes for custom fields. If nobody has filled in a field in a year, it is probably not needed, and removing it makes the client record faster to read.

The Short Version

Use a short list of billing tags, keep account details in custom fields, use tags to speed up the month-end review and split your reports, and update tags whenever a plan changes. For more billing guides, return to the trash can cleaning billing software page.