TrashCanBossPro Blog — Recurring Plans

Reports on Active Trash Can Cleaning Plans: Knowing What You Have

Ask a bin cleaning owner how many active subscribers they have and you will often get a pause, then a guess. “Around 180? Maybe 200?” That guess is the foundation of every decision they make: when to hire, when to buy a second trailer, how much to spend on marketing. It is worth replacing the guess with a real number.

You Cannot Manage a Guess

Retention habits, covered in Keeping Trash Can Cleaning Subscribers Year After Year, only help if you can tell whether they are working. That takes numbers you can look up any time, not ones you have to count from a spreadsheet.

In TrashCanBossPro, your clients, addresses, plans and invoices all live in one place, so the answers come from the same data your routes and billing already use.

The Questions Worth Answering

You do not need dozens of reports. A handful of questions, checked every month, tell you most of what you need:

• How many active recurring customers do I have right now?
• How many are on each plan: weekly, every-other-week and monthly?
• How much revenue did recurring cleanings bring in this month?
• How many new plans did I add, and how many cancelled?
• How many cleanings are overdue?
• Who has a past-due balance?

If you can answer those six, you know whether your business is healthy.

Use Tags to Slice the List

Tags are the simplest reporting tool you have. Tag every client by plan and type: Monthly, Every-Other-Week, HOA, Commercial, or tags of your own. Then filter the client list by tag to count and review each group.

Tags also capture things that are not built into the plan itself. A “Summer EOW” tag finds everyone you moved up for the season. A “Cancelled” tag gives you a win-back list. A “Referral” tag shows how many customers came from neighbors. Custom fields on the client record let you track details specific to your business. More in Using Tags to Organize Recurring Bin Cleaning Plan Customers.

The Waiting List as a Live Report

The Waiting List is not usually thought of as a report, but it may be the most useful one you have. At any moment it shows every recurring cleaning that is due, colored not due yet, due now or overdue past a 7-day grace.

A glance tells you how your capacity compares to your customer base. A map full of not-due pins means you are keeping up. A cluster of overdue pins means you are behind somewhere. If overdue starts spreading week after week, you have more subscribers than your current crew can clean, and it is time to think about another trailer or more hours.

Revenue and Billing Reports

Recurring revenue is the number that pays the bills. Because every completed cleaning creates an invoice, your reports can show what recurring work actually billed each month, not just what the plans are supposed to bring in.

Compare the two. If plans should bring in more than you billed, look for the gap: skipped cleanings that were never made up, failed card charges or plan prices that were not updated. Past-due follow-up helps you work through failed charges before they become write-offs.

Make It a Monthly Habit

Reports only help if someone looks at them. Pick one day a month, maybe the first Monday, and spend thirty minutes on the numbers:

• Count active plans by tag and compare to last month.
• Review the month's new sign-ups and cancellations, with reasons.
• Check recurring revenue and past-due balances.
• Look at the Waiting List for overdue patterns.

Write the numbers down in the same place each month. After a year, you will be able to see your seasons, your growth and the effect of every price change and marketing push.

Office Roles and Access

Not everyone in the office needs to see revenue numbers. Office user roles let you set what each person in the office can do, so a part-time scheduler working the Waiting List does not have to have the same access as the owner.

Use the Numbers to Decide

Numbers are only useful if they change what you do. If active plans are growing faster than your crew's capacity, start hiring before cleanings go overdue. If one plan type is shrinking, look at its price and how you sell it. If a neighborhood has many subscribers, spend your next flyer budget there, because every new neighbor makes the route tighter.

Know Your Numbers

A bin cleaning business built on subscriptions should know its subscriber count, plan mix and recurring revenue at any moment. For more on recurring plans, visit the trash can cleaning subscription software page.