PlumbingBossPro Blog — Property Managers & Commercial

Reports by Account: Seeing What Each Commercial Plumbing Client Is Worth

Every plumbing owner has a gut feeling about their accounts. The restaurant group is great. The property manager on the north side is a headache. The church is steady. Gut feelings are often right, but not always. The manager who feels like a headache might be your biggest source of work. The restaurant group that feels great might be paying slow. Reports turn the feeling into something you can check.

Why Account Structure Makes Reports Possible

Tags, covered in Tags and Custom Fields for Commercial Plumbing Accounts, help you sort clients into groups. Reports only work if the work behind them is filed under the right client in the first place.

That is why the one-client-many-addresses setup matters so much. If a property manager's forty properties are forty separate customers, no report will show you what the manager is worth. If they are one client with forty addresses, every job, invoice and statement rolls up to one name. PlumbingBossPro is built that way, and its reports reflect it.

Questions Worth Asking

Once a quarter, sit down with your reports and ask a few plain questions about your commercial accounts:

• Who brings in the most work? Rank commercial clients by what you billed them. The top few deserve your best service and a regular check-in.
• Who calls the most for the least? An account with lots of small calls and little revenue may need a minimum charge or a conversation.
• Who pays on time? Look at open invoices and statements by client. Slow payers may belong on card on file.
• Which recurring plans are current? Check that every restaurant on jetting and every building on backflow testing had its visit.
• Which accounts are growing or shrinking? A manager whose work dropped off may have lost properties, or may be sending work elsewhere.

Recurring Work Is the Backbone

Commercial accounts are most valuable when they include recurring work: grease-line jetting every 14 or 30 days, yearly backflow tests, yearly water heater flushes. That work comes due on the Waiting List on its own and is easy to plan around.

When you look at an account, separate the recurring visits from the one-time calls. An account with steady recurring work is a foundation. An account that only calls in emergencies is useful but less predictable. The goal over time is to move more accounts toward recurring plans, which usually means offering them after an emergency call shows why they are needed.

Looking at Groups, Not Just Clients

With tags on every commercial client, you can look at your work by type. Are restaurants a bigger share of the business than last year? Are landlords growing faster than property managers? Is the church and office work worth the after-hours scheduling it takes?

Those answers shape where you spend effort. If restaurants are carrying more of your revenue, it might be worth dedicating early-morning van time to jetting and asking current restaurant clients for referrals. If landlord work is growing, a yearly flush program across rental portfolios might be the next thing to offer.

Look at drive time too. An account spread across the far edges of your area may bill well but eat a van's morning. Seeing the account's addresses on the map next to its revenue tells you whether it is worth adjusting how you schedule it, or how you price the trip.

Using Reports in the Conversation

Reports are not just for you. A short summary is a good tool when talking to an account. At a yearly check-in with a property manager, you can say what you did for them last year: how many calls, how many properties, how many flushes and tests, and what the upcoming year looks like. That is a much stronger conversation than “we hope you've been happy.”

The yearly check-in is covered next in Keeping Commercial Plumbing Accounts Renewing Year After Year.

Keep It Simple

You do not need a dashboard full of charts. A few questions, asked regularly, about a short list of accounts, will tell you most of what you need. The important part is that the data is there to answer them, because every job was filed at the right address under the right client.

Write down what you decide each quarter, even in a line or two. Next quarter, check whether the change you made — a minimum charge, a new jetting plan, a switch to card on file — did what you hoped.

Office user roles help here too. Owners and office managers can see the numbers they need, while techs see their jobs.

For more on running commercial accounts, visit the commercial plumbing software page.