SolarCleaningBossPro Blog — Solar Panel Cleaning Software

Property Owner Accounts in Solar Panel Cleaning Software: Many Buildings, One Monthly Statement

Some of the best customers a solar cleaning company can land are property owners: someone with several rental homes, a business with a few buildings, a landlord with a strip of warehouses. One relationship, many arrays, steady repeat work. They also come with a billing headache if your software treats every building as a separate customer.

Where Billing Gets Complicated

Billing in Solar Panel Cleaning Software: Invoices, Card on File and Auto-Charge covered billing for a single home: one cleaning, one invoice, one charge. Property owners break that model. Six buildings cleaned in one month means six invoices, six emails and six payments for the owner's bookkeeper to match up. Most of them would rather get one bill.

One Client, Many Addresses

In SolarCleaningBossPro, a property owner is one client with many addresses. Each address is its own site with its own:

• Panel details: number of panels, mount, stories, pitch and extras
• Access notes: spigot, roof access side, gate code, building contact
• Recurring plan: quarterly, twice a year or yearly
• Service history, photos and notes

So the warehouse with a flat-roof array can be quarterly while the owner's rental house with a small rooftop array is yearly. They are different jobs, but they belong to the same customer.

Monthly Account Billing

Set the client to Monthly, and instead of an invoice after every cleaning, they get one statement each month that covers every building or site cleaned. Each line on the statement is labeled with the address, so the owner can see exactly which building was cleaned and what it cost.

That one change makes you much easier to work with. The owner's bookkeeper gets one document a month. They can still split costs by building because every line says where the work was. And you are not sending a stack of small invoices that can get lost.

Scheduling Many Sites

Each address comes due on its own plan and lands on the Waiting List like any other cleaning. When several of one owner's sites are due at once, it often makes sense to put them on the same truck on the same day. Auto-route puts them in order from the shop, and you can adjust by hand.

For companies that split work by truck, property owner sites often ride on the commercial truck. A common setup is one truck on homes and one on commercial arrays, as covered in Residential and Commercial Work in One Solar Panel Cleaning Software.

Access Notes for Buildings

Commercial and rental properties tend to have different access needs from a single home. Use the access notes on each address for things like:

• Which roof hatch or ladder to use
• Who holds the key and how to reach them
• Where to park the truck without blocking tenants or deliveries
• Any hours when roof access is not allowed
• Tenant notice needed before crews arrive

Because the notes are on the address, they show on the tech's phone every visit, and a new tech does not have to call the property manager for the same information every quarter.

Adding a New Building

Property owners buy and sell. When an owner adds a building, add an address to the existing client rather than creating a new customer. Enter the panel details and access notes, set its plan, and it joins the monthly statement from its first cleaning. When they sell one, take that address off the plan so it stops coming due. The rest of the account carries on unchanged.

Tags and Custom Fields

Tag the client Commercial to keep property owner accounts easy to find, and use custom fields for anything specific to the account, like a purchase order number or the name of the building manager for each site. Clients, Addresses, Tags and Custom Fields in Solar Panel Cleaning Software covers how to set those up.

Winning the Account

Property owners care about two things from a cleaning company: that every building is done on schedule without them having to follow up, and that the billing is simple. Recurring plans that come due on their own handle the first. One labeled monthly statement handles the second. Being able to say yes to both when you pitch the account makes a difference. Before and after photos from each site, saved with every job, are a good thing to offer too.

To see how property owner accounts fit into the rest of the software, visit the solar panel cleaning software overview.