Best Practices For Poop Scooping Companies

If you offer pet waste disposal services to your clients or if that is your company’s main focus, we have several features that you can utilize to make scheduling services and receiving payments easier for yourself, your staff members, and your clients. 

Client Portal Tag & New Client Form Link On Website

Time To Pet aims to provide a seamless experience for both existing and prospective clients looking to book services with their favorite pet care providers. 

By adding a Client Portal Tag to your website, existing clients can easily access their Time To Pet accounts, where they can request visits, communicate with you and your team, and submit payments. The Client Portal Tag can be left blank, or you can choose a custom URL for your clients to use. Most customers choose to use the name of their business for the URL and set up their company logo and display colors to match their website in the Settings > Company Settings > Theme section of their account so that everything matches and meets a client’s expectations. 

In addition to the Client Portal Tag, you can use the Allow Clients To Create New Accounts feature to build and add a link to a New Client Form on your website for prospective clients to fill out. This feature can save you and your team a lot of administrative time by allowing clients to create their own profiles and go through the Pet Parent Onboarding process for your company on their own time. 

You can also choose whether new client accounts need to be approved by you or another Admin team member or if you would like them to be automatically approved. Many of our customers choose to have them require approval so that they have an opportunity to review the inquiry and give them a call to arrange a Meet & Greet or schedule their first service.

Custom Client And Pet Fields

Time To Pet allows you to create customized Client and Pet Fields that you can require clients to fill out as they create their accounts or complete your company's onboarding process. These fields can be used to capture a variety of information, including how often they would like your company to come by to remove their pet’s waste, instructions on how to access their yard, and information on their pet’s behavior if they are going to be present as you complete your visit or offer additional walking services. If you would like, you can also require clients to fill in these fields before they are able to submit service requests through their Client Apps or Portals.

Staff members with an Administrator role can set fields to be required through their Staff Dashboard in the Settings > Company Settings > Client Fields or Settings > Company Settings > Pet Fields section of their account:

Administrators can also create fields for internal use only and restrict whether or not they are visible to clients or staff members. You can use these fields to take notes regarding the client, their pet, or their residence if there are important things that you want your staff to be aware of but don’t necessarily want your clients to see. 

This can be done by unchecking the "Client Editable", "Client Visible", and "Required" options (or by unchecking the “Staff Visible” option if it’s a field you don’t want visible your team members):

Client And Staff Flags

The Flags feature has countless possibilities and can help you organize your clients and staff members. Both clients and staff can have up to ten flags assigned to their profile, and these flags will appear almost everywhere you see a client or staff member’s name within Time To Pet. These flags cannot be seen by clients and are only visible to Administrators, Office Managers, or Staff. Some pet waste removal companies label clients based on the frequency of their services, the neighborhood they live in, or a specific route name if they split up jobs based on a client’s location. 

Mapping Tools

Whether you’re running a solo operation or you have a team of staff members, completing the visits on your route in an efficient and timely manner is one of the most important aspects to running a successful pet waste disposal business. Having a good understanding of what events are on your route and the ideal order to do them in are crucial to delivering them that top-notch service.

With our Geo Schedule feature, you can view a specific day’s schedule plotted out on a map for all of the members on your team or you can focus in on a particular team member using the Map Staff Schedule tool and see the suggested order of events. This order is based on the times services are scheduled, but if you schedule events in windows and have more than one event scheduled at the same time, it will defer to the order in which they were scheduled. 

Our Geo Schedule plots not only the clients scheduled to receive service that day but also can display where you and your staff members live. This can be helpful if you and your team begin your routes from home. It can also tell you when events are out of a staff member’s service area (as you can set which areas a staff member serves on their profiles). If you or one of your team members is assigned to someone far away from the rest of their events, you can make the necessary changes to ensure that each team member’s route is as optimized as it can be. This will go a long way in terms of ensuring both client and staff satisfaction. 

The Geo Schedule and Map Staff Schedule features are ideal for Administrators or Office Managers who oversee route optimization or handle assigning staff members to visits. However, we haven’t forgotten about staff members! We also offer a Daily Visit Map feature that is only available through the Staff App. This feature lets staff view their scheduled events by day on a map within the app, change the suggested order of their visits, and easily get directions to their next event from their current location.

Setting Up Services

Time To Pet allows you to create an unlimited number of Services that can be tailored to the specific needs of your business. Whether you offer different frequencies for your pet waste removal services, set up Meet & Greet with your clients before the first scheduled appointment, or offer other services such as dog walking, you can create a service for each and every one of them.

You can also determine whether clients can select a service when submitting requests through their Client App/Portal. If there are services you prefer to schedule yourself as an Administrator, you can uncheck that option, and they will not appear in the list of available services to your clients. 

You can also determine the days and times clients are able to select for each service when making requests through their Client App/Portal. For example, if you don’t offer services on the weekends or if you only offer dog walking services in the afternoon, you can set up Schedule Blocks for those specific timeframes in the Settings > Client Settings > Schedule Blocks section of your account and select which ones are available for that service from its “Scheduling” tab using the “Limited To Specific Blocks” option.

It’s also possible to configure the additional fees you would like to automatically charge for each service in the “Auto Fees” tab of the service you are editing. Whether you charge for After Hour Fees, Extra Pet Rates, Holiday Fees, or Weekend Fees, you can set them up to your liking on a service-by-service basis. In addition, you can determine whether or not you would like them to stack one on top of the other if more than one fee would apply to a service and can decide how much staff are paid, as well. 

These options give you complete control over the price of each service, the default rates paid to staff, the duration of each service, and more. If you offer discounts to clients with regular schedules, you can even set up a frequency discount for each service and give it different levels depending on the frequency of the visits. Frequency Discounts can be especially useful if you offer dog walking in addition to your pet waste removal services. 

Setting Up Your Service Area

Our customers who specialize in pet waste removal services tend to have larger service areas that may encompass several neighborhoods or counties. In the Settings > Company Settings > General section of your account, you can input a list of all of the zip codes your business serves.

Once these zip codes have been entered, you can then assign them to your staff members directly on their profiles based on the areas they service.

You can also run reporting based on these zip codes, as well, in the Reporting > Financial section of your account. 

Scheduling Repeat Services Using Templates

Do you have a lot of regular clients that you’re scheduling the same appointments for week after week? Does it cause you to expend more energy than you’d like doing administrative work when you could be spending that time growing your business instead? If the answer is yes (and it most likely is if your business focuses on pet waste removal), then look no further than our Templates feature!

Using our Templates feature, you can create a set of services on a weekly, multi-weekly, or monthly basis once and then have those services automatically added onto the schedule without you having to lift a finger! You can set up a Template on an individual client-by-client basis and keep track of them from the Scheduler > Templates tab section of your Staff Dashboard.

You can also configure the billing frequency and have it either match or differ from your company’s default invoice settings. 

You can also configure how far in advance Templates are approved, how far in advance Templates services are shown on the company calendar using the Projections feature, and have them display on the client’s calendar as well so that they will always know when they have upcoming services booked in the event they need to cancel. When the Projections feature is enabled, the Template events will appear in an orange color that will be visible to Administrators and Office Managers on the main Scheduler but that will not be visible to staff members (the events will become visible to staff once the Template they are a part of is approved onto the calendar).

This will ensure you don’t overbook yourself or your staff and are aware of upcoming services in advance so that you can plan accordingly.

If you would like to set up a monthly subscription type service where you charge your clients a flat rate each month if they receive regular pet waste removal services from you, we have instructions on how to configure that with our Templates feature in our help article here: Best Practices For Charging A Flat Monthly Rate For Recurring Weekly Services.

Easy Communication With Clients

Time To Pet has several tools that allow for seamless communication between you, your clients, and your staff members. Each client and staff member has their own conversation thread that you and your team can communicate with them through. We also allow you to enable a secondary private message thread for clients that will only be visible to Administrators or Office Managers with the appropriate permissions. This can be useful when handling invoicing, client questions or concerns, and if there are certain matters you would prefer staff members not be privy to.

Administrators and Office Managers can also see an overview of all incoming client and staff messages from the Messages Center. For further organization, you can even create message tags and star important messages that you need to come back to or if you need to signal to other team members that a message has been seen and is being worked on. 

You can also create and send mass email campaigns to both clients and staff from the Messages Center. 

For more information on the different methods of communication possible within Time To Pet, please see our help article on Understanding Messaging In Time To Pet. You can follow the link in each section for a more in-depth look and instructions on how to utilize each particular method.

Collecting Payments

Ensuring you and your team get paid is one of the most important aspects of managing a business. Time To Pet makes this effortless through the use of our integrated payment processor, Time To Pet Payments, which allows clients to pay their invoices directly through their Client Portal or Time To Pet Mobile App. Depending on your location, when connected to Time To Pet Payments, your clients may be able to pay using their credit or debit card, Apple or Google Pay, or by connecting their bank account. 

As soon as a client has scheduled services with your team, an invoice is generated that can be sent directly to them via email. They can also view their due or unpaid invoices through their Client App/Portal, depending on your company’s settings. 

You can also require that clients add a payment method when going through your company’s onboarding process or limit their ability to request services if they don’t have a payment method on file. This greater control makes it easier to assure that your clients pay for services rendered and don’t require you to chase them down to collect payment. 

If you prefer to have clients by cash or check, however, you can also manually enter and track payments through Time To Pet as well. 

Additional Tools

Happiness Score

Our Happiness Score feature allows clients to leave feedback on the service provided to them by you and your team. It can be used in tandem with our Visit Report Cards feature and customized in the Settings > Advanced > Happiness section of your account. Be sure to share these Happiness Scores on social media or on your website!

Portal Notification

The Portal Notification feature is great if you have announcements you would like to make to your entire client base. When activated, you can add a custom message in the form of a banner to the top of every page in a client’s portal. You can enable this setting and customize the message in the Settings > Client Settings > Portal Settings section of your account. 

Tipping

If connected to our integrated payment processor, Time To Pet Payments, you can enable tipping for your clients. If they would like to regularly tip you or your team for your services, you can set up an Automatic Tip on their account, or they can add tips when submitting payments through their Client App/Portal. For more information, see our help article here: Tipping In Time To Pet.

Visit Report Cards

Visit Report Cards are an amazing tool that you can customize to suit the services your business offers while providing amazing updates to your clients. Visit Report Cards allow you the opportunity to write a note to your clients, provide photos or video (especially useful if you offer walking services on top of your pet waste removal services), and have staff members answer customized questions. You can enable and configure Visit Report Cards in the Settings > Mobile App > Visit Report Cards section of your account. For more information, see our help article here: Visit Report Cards.