DumpsterBossPro Blog — Contractor Accounts

Tags and Custom Fields for Contractor Accounts: Job Numbers, Supers and Billing Notes

Every contractor's office has its quirks. One needs its internal job number on every line. One wants invoices addressed to a specific approver. One property manager uses property codes. A good roll-off office remembers all of it, and a great one writes it down where everyone can see it.

Builder accounts, covered in Home Builder Accounts: Subdivisions, Phases and Cans on Every Lot, are the ones where these details pile up fastest. Tags and custom fields are where they go.

Tags Versus Custom Fields

Tags sort accounts into groups: builder, roofer, remodeler, property manager, demolition. You can also tag by area, priority or status. Custom fields capture specific information: a job number, an approver's name, a property code, a billing note.

Use tags when you want to pull a list or compare groups. Use custom fields when you want to record a detail that belongs to one account or job.

The trick is to capture these details once, in a place everyone looks, rather than in someone's memory or an old email. A detail that lives only in your bookkeeper's head disappears the day she takes a vacation.

Think of tags and custom fields as the memory of the office. They let a new dispatcher handle a builder's call as smoothly as someone who has worked the account for years.

Tags Worth Having

Start with account type, since it is the most useful for comparing in reports. Add area tags if you serve more than one region. A priority or key account tag helps the office know who gets squeezed in on a busy day. A quiet tag for accounts that have not rented in a while makes a good follow-up list.

Keep the tag list short. Twenty tags nobody uses are worse than five everyone does.

Name tags plainly. Builder is better than BLD-1. A new office person should understand every tag without asking.

Custom Fields Contractors Ask For

The most common is a contractor job number, so the bookkeeper can match your line to their project. Others include the name of the person who approves hauling bills, a property code for managers, and a billing note such as email invoices to accounts payable only.

Some contractors want a PO number recorded. You can store it in a custom field. DumpsterBossPro does not run a purchase-order approval workflow, so the field is a record, not a control.

Before adding a custom field, ask whether more than one contractor needs it. A field built for one customer's quirk often ends up empty on every other account. Sometimes a note on that one account is the better place.

Fields on the Job Site

Some details belong to a site rather than the account: the super for that site, the site's job number, the subdivision phase. Keeping those details with the site means they show up on every job there, including on the monthly invoice line where the bookkeeper needs them.

Decide at setup where each detail lives and be consistent. If one office person puts the job number on the account and another puts it on the site, nobody will find it.

Make sure the custom fields that matter for billing appear where the bookkeeper will see them. A job number that only lives on the account record does not help if the invoice line does not show it.

If a contractor changes its internal job numbering, update the field on active sites right away. An old number on a new invoice line sends the bookkeeper hunting through closed projects.

Using Tags in Reports

Tags pay off in reports. Compare builders against remodelers against property managers by work and by invoiced and paid. You may find that remodelers are a smaller share of volume but pay fastest, or that one area produces most of your extra-day revenue.

Those patterns guide decisions about where to market and which accounts deserve more attention.

Tags also help with marketing to your own customers. A short note to every remodeler about winter availability, or to every builder about planned swap rhythms, is easy to send when the list is already tagged.

Keeping It Clean

Review tags and fields every few months. Remove what nobody uses, merge duplicates and make sure new office staff know the conventions. Clean data makes every report and every invoice better.

A field you cannot explain in one sentence is a field nobody will fill in correctly. Keep each one simple.

Next, the guide covers reports by account. For how tags and fields fit into contractor accounts, see the DumpsterBossPro contractor dumpster rental software page.