DumpsterBossPro Blog — Contractor Accounts

Importing Your Contractor Customer List With CSV

The hardest part of switching software is not learning the new system. It is getting your old data into it without dragging the old mess along. Contractor accounts are where that mess usually lives: the builder entered five times, the super's cell as the account phone, three spellings of the same subdivision.

Reports in Reports by Account: Which Contractors Actually Make You Money are only as good as the data under them. That starts with the import.

Export What You Have

Whether your customers live in an old system, a spreadsheet or an accounting file, export them to a spreadsheet. Names, phone numbers, emails and addresses are the core. Anything else is a bonus. Do not worry about getting everything at once; you can add detail after import.

Save a copy of the original export before you change anything. If something goes wrong, you want the untouched version.

Plan a few hours, not a few minutes. The import itself is quick. The cleanup before it, and the setup after it, is where the value is made, and rushing those parts brings the old problems into the new system.

Merge Duplicate Contractors

Sort by name and look for the same contractor appearing more than once. Usually they were created one per job. Pick one row per company and keep the office contact on it. The extra rows' addresses are not lost; they become job sites after import.

This is the single most valuable cleanup you can do. One account per contractor is what makes the monthly invoice and reports by account work.

Watch for near duplicates as well as exact ones. A builder entered once with LLC, once without and once with Custom in the middle of the name may be one company or three. A quick call to clear it up is better than guessing.

Fix the Contact Information

Make sure the phone and email on each contractor row belong to the office or billing contact, not a super. Supers move between jobs and builders; the billing contact is what invoices and payment notices need. Put super contacts aside to add to job sites later.

Check that emails look valid. An invoice email to a typo address is an invoice that never gets paid.

Look for missing data and decide whether it matters. A contractor with no email cannot receive invoice emails, so call and get one before their first monthly invoice. A contractor with no address may only need a job site added later.

Run the CSV Import

DumpsterBossPro imports customers from CSV. Map your columns to the fields, run the import and spot-check a handful of records. Names, phones and addresses are enough to start booking jobs.

Import in a quiet hour, not on your busiest morning. A careful import beats a fast one.

After the import, search for a few contractors you know well and check their records. If anything looks wrong, such as a phone in the email column, fix the spreadsheet mapping and re-check before carrying on.

If your old system stored notes like gate codes or billing quirks in a free-text column, keep that column in the spreadsheet. Even if it does not map cleanly, you can copy what matters onto the account and site notes as you set up each contractor.

After the Import: Sites, Tags and Billing

With accounts in place, go through your active contractors and add their job sites, with access and placement notes. Tag each account by type. Mark contractor and commercial accounts for monthly billing. Add custom fields for job numbers or billing notes where needed.

Start with your ten biggest accounts. They drive most of your work, and getting them right first means the most important invoices are clean from the first month.

As you set up sites, ask each contractor's office to confirm the billing contact and the sites that are active. That one call per account cleans up details the old system never had right, and it tells your contractors you are getting more organized.

Running Old and New Side by Side

For a short transition, you may run both systems. Set a clear cutover date for new jobs, and finish open jobs where they started. Do not let the overlap drag; two systems for a month is manageable, two systems for a season is chaos.

Tell your key contractors when you switch, especially if invoices or notices will look different. A one-line heads-up prevents the bookkeeper from wondering whether a new-looking invoice is legitimate.

Next, the guide covers role-based users for the office. For how import fits into setting up contractor accounts, see the DumpsterBossPro contractor dumpster rental software page.