Carefully managing every aspect of your company is pivotal to maintaining a healthy business, especially in recent years as the market has evolved. Savvy business owners understand the importance of healthy pool service cash flow and visibility into financial metrics. Accurate forecasting can also help keep a business on track and make it easier to plan your budget with confidence.

The pool and spa industry involves a lot of ups and downs and seasonality, making a healthy cash flow even more important, and difficult to maintain. Below, we’ve compiled some tips to ensure cash flow isn’t forgotten during the busy season and contributes to your bottom line during the slow season.

Pool Service Cash Flow Tip #1: Accurate Quoting

Customer service is critical to your business, and providing accurate quotes is part of offering good customer service and a positive customer experience. An accurate quote also establishes a base rate and expectation of what is covered within that rate. Then, if your customer decides to upgrade an option or add accessories, you can refer back to the original quote when explaining the required increase in cost, tracking every change in potential revenue. Keeping the original quote up-to-date with all changes documented presents your business as professional, organized, and transparent — a business your customers feel comfortable trusting.

An accurate quote is also an excellent record of precisely what’s needed for the job, which makes collecting the resources and materials needed easier. It also makes it easier to forecast spending and maintain the cash flow the business needs to stay on track.

RB’s swimming pool quote software provides a job estimating system that allows pool builders to enter customized template questions specific to their business. This way, salespeople don’t miss any job specifications or questions necessary for creating a quote or job estimate. The job estimating system allows you to calculate the job’s selling price and add inventory, parts, labor, and subcontractor expenses.

Pool Service Cash Flow Tip #2: Automated Warranty Claims Tracking

Pool and spa business owners have begun uncovering new ways to keep the cash flowing during the slower months. For example, mobile pool water testing provides customers with convenience by conducting the testing at their home rather than requiring them to travel to the store.

Warranty claims tracking is another great way to generate more pool service cash flow during the slow season. There is often a pile of warranty claims to process at the end of the summer, and each one represents an opportunity for revenue. Many savvy pool business owners have caught onto this already and use those claims to keep earnings flowing as orders begin to slow down.

However, many also use manual or semi-manual processes to track those claims. Keeping track of claims without a dedicated automated system often leaves money on the table, because manual tracking doesn’t guard against human error. The best way to ensure you’re capturing all revenue possible from warranty claims tracking is to use an automated system that integrates with your overall business management software.

That’s why RB includes automated warranty claims tracking. Our system can help you keep a flawless record free of errors, saving you and your staff time on manual or double data entry and ensuring you get the most from your warranty claims processing. The additional pool service cash flow this generates usually covers the total cost of the business software and then some.

Pool Service Cash Flow Tip #3: Route Optimization

Because your service staff spends part of each day in transit rather than in billable hours, there’s an opportunity to optimize your service routes to minimize travel time and save time and money. With increasing gas prices, this is more true now than ever before. Pool service route optimization will increase efficiency while reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction.

You could spend hours looking at maps to find the best routes for your techs to take, or you can let our pool service routing software do it for you. But it does more than just plan routes: RB’s software also enables your techs to work more efficiently by allowing them to clock in and out on-site rather than spending valuable time traveling to the office to punch a clock, saving gas to improve your pool service cash flow.

However, mobile technology ensures they aren’t out of touch with the office. A GPS feature allows office staff to track their whereabouts to handle dispatching remotely. And RB’s Mobile Live app syncs with office software to enable instant access to customer profiles. This means techs have all necessary specifications and warranty information on hand, eliminating repeat trips to the office. It also allows techs to prepare invoices and accept payments before leaving a site. This can reduce the time spent on billing and provide a valuable service to customers who prefer to pay on the spot.

Pool Service Cash Flow Tip #4: Billing

Pool service billing software becomes especially valuable during the busy summer season because it helps you ensure progress billing is completed quickly for optimal cash flow. Progress billing is particularly important for service departments doing bigger service jobs, such as changing pool liners and painting pools. When looking at billing software features, be sure managers can calculate progress billing payments based on the project’s state of completion and send the totals directly to the accounts receivable (AR) department so they can bill clients.

Having an online bill pay feature is a crucial component to ensuring the most optimal pool service cash flow. With an online bill pay feature, service invoices become a part of a reliable billing process to make it easier and more convenient for customers to pay for their services. Pool and spa companies are investing in online bill pay systems that allow them to send invoices via email and eliminate the cost of envelopes, stamps, labels, paper, and printer ink. It can also reduce labor costs by eliminating the time it takes to bill and collect payments. Additionally, by providing an electronic payment option, you provide your clients with the convenience of streamlined, touch-free business transactions.

Don’t forget about new mobile technology options that allows in-field personnel to take payments on the job site. By using a mobile device, the project team can accept payments that will immediately be listed on the payment screen. This allows payments to be made, but only up to the amount of the main job minus any outstanding costs and previous billings.

Features like real-time data syncs and fully-automated billing workflows will keep your team organized, improving efficiency on the backend while enhancing your customer experience. They also prevent costly billing errors like missed contract renewals and incorrectly calculated invoices – all of which have a huge effect on your company’s bottom line.

Pool Service Cash Flow Tip #5: Reporting

Real-time reporting allows managers to instantly obtain service billing on all open or completed service jobs and projects to guard against errors and oversights. This feature keeps service department managers informed on the status of all service jobs with a record of who, what, where, and when for each one. It helps prevent errors that can impact pool service cash flow, and provides visibility that makes financial forecasting easier and more accurate.

You can also generate a report of a customer’s purchase history on the integrated company’s RB Server, and customers can log in to your website to view their order history, regardless of whether their purchase was online or in-store.

“In the accounting department, reporting is my favorite thing about RB,” says Jennifer from Johnson Pools and Spas. “The fact that I can go in and pull out just about any information that I want is very helpful. If I want to know what products sold on a particular day, there’s a report for that. If I want to know the profit of a department in any particular month, there’s a report for that. I can pull reports that tell me how much income we did in cash, in checks, and in credit cards in any given time period. I love that.”

RB’s business software is specifically designed to position pool service businesses for growth. To discover how to grow your pool service business with our 5-star rated software, contact us to schedule a demo.