Agreements (with their Renewals) are essentially a communication tool. They offer a way to track general information about your arrangement with the customer. At a minimum, they cover the service, price, frequency, and renewal terms. Most importantly, for you, they provide a mechanism for getting your customers to consistently renewal. Look at Agreements, as a promise to your customer of what you will do. In exchange for this promise, and your quality work, they will renew year after year. This blogpost is about how software can help us maintain high renewal rates.

What are Scripts? Little invisible programs that automate our navigation, actions and reports. Every button, in software, really is just a trigger for an underlying script! In the big picture, these are the objects that save you time and make you money. Lets try to gain some insight into the world of scripts so as to better grasp this important component of any quality software solution.

Recall that a database Table is place where we store one type of data. And that Relationships provide links between records. Lets use our kitchen metaphor again to consider database Layouts. This one is easy! A database Layout is like a separate floor plan drawn around each type of thing you do in the kitchen, such as cooking, serving, or cleaning up, showing the drawers, cupboards, and appliances needed for that task. It shows what you see and what you can do. A Layout gives you access to everything you need in one place. Layouts are where we do our work. And since we do a lot of work, a good database has lots of layouts!

Recall that a database Table is place where we store one type of data. To revisit the metaphor of a kitchen, it is a single drawer or cupboard. But it is a special ‘drawer’ that only shows the data we want to see at that time. This is almost magic. How can this work? It works because of Relationships. In this post, we will show how we can have the right data appear at the right time and place, but nowhere else. This is the world of Relationships.

Database tables are like drawers in a kitchen. If well laid out, you will have a place for everything and those drawers will be placed to make cooking and cleaning up a pleasure. Typically, each drawer or cupboard contains a single type of item: silverware, pots and pans, plates, glasses etc. Databases are organized the same way. Each table contains only a single type of info. And great databases, like kitchens, have plenty of tables that are carefully designed for efficient workflow and a great user experience.

Software is changing the world. At first we thought it was the ‘computer revolution’ but time has shown that the ‘software revolution’ is far more important. Industry by industry has been transformed by software. Our pest control industry will also be transformed. This post gives a few examples of how software can improve and even re-invent your business.

Software is changing the world. At first we thought it was the ‘computer revolution’ but time has shown that the ‘software revolution’ is far more important. Industry after industry has been transformed by software. Our pest control industry will also be transformed. This post is intended to look at the big question of why software is so important.

It can be fun to compare nice, well-made cars to good software. This is an apt comparison. Slip into a nice car and just look around. Notice how few labels there are? Now, very few controls in a car have labels. Crazy! Their function, instead, is identified by location and perhaps an icon. This is a classic representations of minimalism. As Jony Ives, Apple’s guru of design, would say, “If it is not essential, it’s just not there”. Great design is not about packing lots of buttons and features into a solution, rather it is the elimination of those things not critical to its essential core.

Where does great customer service start? Knowing your customers needs well and using that knowledge effectively. The means of carefully keeping and curating information for customers defines any good software software in our industry. Customer Relationship Management (‘CRM’) pieces are perhaps the most critical component of ANY pest control software package.

In the early days of pest control software, work orders, tickets, service orders, and invoices were all considered the same thing. Most represented work needed to be done. Of them, ‘Work Orders’ has become perhaps the most widely used name. But what about Invoices? Are they the same thing? No, Invoices have grown to represent something different. An Invoice is something created to request a payment. Typically, it would be for work completed, but it also could be for some purchased product, like sticky traps or ant bait. As software became more refined through time, most software packages began to separate these two concepts because of the power this separation provides.