Plumbing & Supply Store Inventory Software

Kenny has a Plumbing & Supplies Store that he purchased a few year ago from the owner. Kenny jumped at the chance to buy the business when the previous owner wanted to retire. Since Kenny was the top service rep he knew he could keep his list of customers happy.

The previous owner used MS Works to keep track fo his customers and the services performed. Since the previous owner stayed in the office all day, and Kenny was on the road he never imagined how hard it would be to run the business.

Kenny's first mistake was to hire a family friend to run the retail end and answer the phone. Messages were unreadable and forget about scheduling jobs. Kenny spent most of his time criss-crossing the town in order to get to customers and seasonal service contracts.

His problems didn't stop their. His other team of plumbers were constantly stopping a job to head back to the shop because they forgot a part they needed for an installation. He was in way over his head and when he eventually fired his office manager he hired an office & retail manager with experience. The results weren't much different. The office manager had never used MS Works before.

Kenny had seen our software being used before and gave us a call. He purchased our Multi-User version for just a few of our features. He wanted to track inventory, track customer sales and build Kits for basic installation such as Water Heaters so the plumbing crews would have all the items they would need to complete a job. Kenny got alot more than he realized.

As Barb, the office manager was getting to know the software she saw the "Scheduler" Feature. As she started to play around with it she saw that it could be used to help schedule jobs and projects. After a meeting with Kenny, Barb started to use the scheduler just for Kenny's crew at first then she added the 2 additional plumbing crews. The Scheduler worked great and was easy to use. They could now schedule seasonal service by region and not criss-cross the city doing service calls.

Kenny's business is really starting to take off now. Barb is keeping track of where all the crews are and when an emergency pops up she knows who is closest and can make the call to reschedule seasonal service calls and direct them to the emergencies. The crews stay out now until the job is complete, never having to come back to the shop for parts. Barb's next project to to start to play with the Time Card & Payroll Features, then move into the Full Accounting aspect of the software.

The only problem Kenny has now is with the cost of gas. According to him he spends more time filling the gas tanks of the Plumbing Vans than he ever did. "We are so busy it seems like we should buy a gas station", chuckles Kenny, "Really I don't know how much we wasted in gas before we started to use the scheduler. Using the scheduler really created alot of free time, and knowing where my guys are is a big plus when it comes to emergancies like and older couple that called last january and had no heat in their house. Being able to dispatch a crew that were working 2 miles away made me feel good about what it is that we do. They had heat in less than 20 minutes from the time of their call." "Barb can't wait to see what other treasures your software has.", smiles Kenny, "You've created a Monster, but a Good Monster. I can't thank you guys enough, keep up the good work."