Small to medium-sized septic contractors often have busy days coordinating crews, handling customer calls, chasing overdue invoices, and tracking down old paperwork for compliance purposes.
Our team spoke with septic businesses across North America, and they all agreed that if they could save 30 minutes per day, they would be happy, let alone hours.
That’s why we developed Septic Management Solutions, a cloud-based septic business software platform that works the way septic businesses operate on a daily basis.
Contents
Where Your Time Goes (without software)
Before we can get into the daily savings, it’s important to point out the areas that bleed time every single week.
- Manually scheduling & rescheduling jobs: playing phone tag, paper notes, texting your crew
- Handwritten job notes & service records: writing paper notes, service records and then re-entering or uploading them elsewhere.
- Invoicing by hand or in spreadsheets: invoicing days after job completion, and tracking who’s paid manually.
- Driving routes that aren’t optimized: two jobs that are 5 miles apart that could’ve been completed back-to-back.
- Following up with overdue invoices: phone calls, and emails that could be automated.
- Pulling up service history (for compliance, home ownership changes, etc.): digging through paper files, or through memory when a customer calls.
These are just a small percentage of daily infractions that, when added up, can waste hours of time each week.
Where The 5+ Hours Come From
1. Software Scheduling
With paper or spreadsheets, scheduling is easy to spend 40+ minutes a day just managing the board. As the dispatcher, you need to confirm with customers, add times to the calendar, and update the crew if things change.
With software like Septic Management Solutions, scheduling is easy with a drag-and-drop calendar, and your clients are notified of upcoming services through SMS and email notifications. When a job moves, your crew is notified. No more phone tag, double booking, or showing up to the wrong address.
Weekly time saved: 1-3 hours
2. Digital Job Forms
When your techs fill out paper forms in the field, someone back at the office has to re-enter or upload that data somewhere else, whether it’s a spreadsheet, Google Drive, a computer file, or an invoicing system.
Digital forms eliminate those admin tasks entirely. Your tech completes the job, fills in the form on their phone or iPad, and the record is updated under the property information automatically. Each job gets updated in real time without re-entering or uploading the service records.
Weekly time saved: 1-2 hours
3. Route Optimization
Inefficient routes can add up fast, and jobs can get scattered across a wide area without logical sequencing, and can cost wasted fuel and hours.
Built-in route optimization looks at your daily jobs and arranges them in the most efficient order. For crews running 4+ pumpouts each, the hours can compile if not assigned to the right truck. Proper route optimization also takes into account disposal stations for optimal efficiency.
Weekly time estimate: 1-4 hours (across your whole crew)
4. Invoicing Happens Same Day
Unorganized invoicing usually gets batched, meaning days can go by before customers are billed, cash flow slows down, and someone on your team is spending a huge portion of their Friday afternoon on invoices from earlier in the week.
When job information flows simultaneously with invoicing, you can send an invoice the moment a job is marked complete and approved. Your customers get billed faster, and your team isn’t doing duplicate work.
Weekly time saved: 1-2 hours
Time Added Up
Conservatively, those four areas alone account for 5-8 hours per week, and that’s before you factor in how much easier it is to pull up property history, manage compliance records, and track outstanding jobs and invoices.
For a solo operator (operator plus admin), that’s a full workday you gain back every week. For a crew of 3-4, it’s significantly more.
Is It Worth Switching (even as a family run business)
Some of the biggest factors that lead to hesitation to transition to software include the price of software, learning new systems, migrating old service records, and the contentment with current systems (even if they’re slowing down growth).
Although most septic contractors who make the switch often say they wish they had done so sooner. The learning curve ends up being shorter, and the time savings add up within the first month.
The Septic Management Solutions app is a cost-effective solution built specifically for septic contractors. This means the workflow is based around daily operations, and you’re not paying for tools built for HVAC, electrical or roofing companies.
Ready To See The Difference?
If you’re curious how much time your septic business would save with software, book a free demo, and we’ll walk you through how the platform operates and how it can save your septic business time and money.
Septic Management Solutions is septic-specific software built for contractors who want to run a tighter operation without the paperwork.