PestBossPro Blog — Commercial Accounts

Office Building Pest Control Accounts: Quiet, Regular and Easy to Keep

Offices are the steady accounts of commercial pest control. They rarely have the pest pressure of a restaurant kitchen. They do not call every week about a new unit like an apartment complex. They want the bugs kept out of the break room, the ants kept off the front walk, and a pest company that shows up when it says it will. Do that and an office account can stay with you for years.

A Different Kind of Commercial Client

Property managers and texting were covered in Two-Way Texting With Property Managers About Pest Control Visits. Office accounts often come through a property manager too, especially in multi-tenant buildings. Others come from the business owner directly, like a dental office, an insurance agency or a small company with its own building.

Either way, the office decision maker is usually not watching for pests. They care about two things: no complaints from staff or visitors, and no disruption to the workday.

What Office Service Usually Covers

• Break rooms and kitchens. The most common trouble spot. Crumbs, coffee stations and dishwashers draw ants and roaches.
• Restrooms. Drains and plumbing penetrations.
• Entry points. Doors, dock or service entrances, and window frames.
• Exterior perimeter. Foundation, landscaping beds and the dumpster area.
• Rodent devices. Exterior bait stations if the account includes a rodent program.

Many offices are fine on bi-monthly or quarterly service with the exterior as the focus. Offices with a full kitchen or a history of problems usually go monthly. Set the minimum days between visits to 30, 60 or 90 and each location comes due on the Waiting List on its own.

Working Around the Workday

Most offices want interior service before or after business hours, or on a quiet day of the week. Some are fine with the tech coming in mid-morning as long as they are quiet about it. Write the timing in the access notes so every tech knows:

• “Interior after 5pm only. Exterior any time.”
• “Check in with the front desk. Break room is down the hall on the left.”
• “Key and alarm code in notes. Arm the alarm when you leave.”

In route order, after-hours offices go at the end of the day. A tech who finishes residential stops around 4 can do two offices nearby after 5. Exterior-only visits can slot anywhere in the route.

Automatic arrived alerts can go to the office manager, so they know the tech came even if they had left for the day.

Multi-Tenant Buildings

An office building with several tenants is often managed by one property manager who hires you for the common areas and exterior. Individual tenants may hire you separately for their own suite.

Set up the building owner or property manager as one client with the building as an address. If a tenant hires you separately, add them as their own client with the suite number in the address, so their service and billing stay separate from the building's.

If a property manager has several office buildings, they all go under one client with one monthly statement, the same way an apartment portfolio works.

Keeping Office Records Simple

Offices rarely ask for detailed service records, but when they do, you want to have them. Each completed treatment that used a tracked product keeps an application record with the products, active ingredients, EPA reg. no. if entered, amounts, area treated, target pest, site treated and the tech's license number.

Post-treatment instruction emails can go to the office manager automatically. A short note about what was treated and how long to keep people out of a treated area is often all an office needs. If you have tagged the account Office, you can find all your office accounts quickly when it is time to review them.

How to sort accounts with tags and custom fields is covered in Tags and Custom Fields for Sorting Commercial Pest Control Accounts.

Why Office Accounts Stay

Office accounts are rarely lost to a cheaper competitor. They are lost when service becomes invisible and someone in accounting asks why they are paying for pest control nobody sees. A few things keep you visible without being a bother:

• Arrived alerts and post-treatment emails so the office knows you came.
• A quick text when the tech finds something, like a gap under the back door or ants starting in the break room.
• Before-and-after photos saved with the job when a problem is fixed.
• A clean invoice or monthly statement with the date and service listed.

Pricing is simple too. Purely as an example, an office might be $75 a month or $125 bi-monthly, depending on size and interior work. Your prices come from your own service list. To see how offices fit with the rest of your commercial accounts, visit the PestBossPro commercial pest control software page.