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Squeegee App Advice

BESKAN Ben

New member
Messages
11
Location
Wakefield
Good Evening All

So this is my first post after reading and reading and reading this amazingly informative forum for the past few weeks. I am currently just starting up so I am one of those annoying newbies. I'm a single dad that is trying to free up more time/be more flexible in my life to spend with my 2 young girls. 

I have got answers on most of the questions and queries I have had just through the search bar which has been great, so thank you for all of your previous posts. I was just wondering what people think of the Squeegee App? Is it worth the paid plan? What do you all use it for most of the time? Any pointers?

Thanks

Ben

 
Good Evening All

So this is my first post after reading and reading and reading this amazingly informative forum for the past few weeks. I am currently just starting up so I am one of those annoying newbies. I'm a single dad that is trying to free up more time/be more flexible in my life to spend with my 2 young girls. 

I have got answers on most of the questions and queries I have had just through the search bar which has been great, so thank you for all of your previous posts. I was just wondering what people think of the Squeegee App? Is it worth the paid plan? What do you all use it for most of the time? Any pointers?

Thanks

Ben
Best of luck mate, definitely a lot of window cleaners in Wakey! I can't comment on squeegee, i'm sure people who do use it will follow up. However I have seen quite a few posts about things going wrong with it on here in the past few years - that being said, not so much recently. 

I use a spreadsheet and have 30 days of work on it. (6 weeks, 5 days a week). Instead of having like a date with each customers next due date I simply just go through the days and make adjustments when needed. I find this works really well and I feel confident that a third party won't ever have my customers data in case anything ever goes wrong.

With squeegee, when I did trial it, I think you could get up to 100 customers for free... something like that. If you like it and grow to over 100 customers then you should be able to afford the £10 a month or whatever it is ?

 
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Hey Ben, 

I am a noob at running my own business too and like yourself quickly looked at the what was available in terms of a good CRM for window cleaners. 

Ive been using this for a few months now and I cannot fault it. 

top features:

  1. it syncs across devices 
  2. weekly planner view makes it easy to see the week ahead 
  3. customers can be added from phone contacts (you get a call, save their number, then easy to add them to the app)
  4. replan work
  5. track payments 
The paid version gives you things like invoices, marketing emails ect. 

Also if you already have a customer database in the form of a spreadsheet this can be easily imported in to the app and also exported if you want a copy of the data. 

 
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Hi mate. All the best with starting up. I’ve been window cleaning for 18 years now and the best way i’ve found to keep a track of my round is using the Calendar app on iphone. My work is monthly, so i just enter the work under each day, each week. Once the job is done, i enter it again in the Calendar app for a months time. As for payments, I use the notes app. When a customer owes, they go on the list, along with amount and date. When they have paid they are deleted from the list. This method requires routine, but it’s free. It works for me. But may not work for you. ????

 
I use squeegee and think it's great. I've never used other software though so can't compare. 

I know a lot of people were put off a year or so ago. They were bringing updates out all the time, sometimes every few days, which was great as new features were being added and they were responding to requests for new features and improvements faster. But the issue seemed to be with the rush that there were bugs slipping through, sometimes fairly serious.

Now they've slowed down and take a lot longer releasing updates and I have no real complaints about bugs at the moment. I can only assume they are spending a lot longer making sure the version is fault free before releasing it. 

They are cheaper than the competition also. 

There is a lot of customisation available which can give it a steep learning curve at first, but once you're used to it, it's a great app, especially for handling automated payments. 

 
Thanks for the best wishes and advice everyone. I had also seen quite a lot of issues previously when I searched the forum but not so many recently. I like the fact that it offers the text alert system the day before you visit a customers house and also sends an invoice after you have been. Just thinking that will save dropping a card through a customers letterbox to say I have been.

 
Hi Ben!

I use Squeegee, I have done since the beginning as well 2.5 years ago! I looked at the other ones and personally couldn't get along with them as at that time none of them ad simple mobile aps!

The free version is fine for a little while. You get the first 100 customers for free, but you will still need to purchase credits for sending text reminders etc (even in the paid version).

It is a great bit of kit once you get you head around the vast number of different features. The main ones you will want to be using though are:

- Work Planner
- Day pilot (works out your best route to take)
- Text reminders
- Payment/we have cleaned your windows messages (works like appointment reminders using your text credits)
 

Get in touch with Susie, Ed and the gang, they will go through the software and features with you and show you how to set it up and use it.

It is still being updated/added to. Like it was said above, they did have a buggy stage where update after update was being rolled out. It was an exciting time for features, but not so exciting when you couldn't fully sync your diary... But they're over the wave now, things are slowing down a bit and the bugs have become fewer and further between.

Best of luck to you in building your business. I chose this route to spend more time with my family too, so I'm glad you're doing the same!

 
The free version is fine for a little while. You get the first 100 customers for free, but you will still need to purchase credits for sending text reminders etc (even in the paid version).
Thanks very much. I didn't realise you still had to pay for the credits on top. I don't think the pricing is very transparent on the website. How much are the credits?

 
Thanks very much. I didn't realise you still had to pay for the credits on top. I don't think the pricing is very transparent on the website. How much are the credits?
You can just use your phone sms service for free instead as an option. The difference is, due to permissions limitations on the Android OS (not sure about IOS), that if you want to use your device to send the text messages, it will send them one at a time to your messaging app, but you have to manually press send on each one. This is fine for invoicing after a clean, I actually prefer it as it gives you an extra opportunity to review and edit the message before it sends. But it can take a little longer if you have say 30 reminder texts to send out. Not too long though. 

Some prefer the text service though as I think it's a non reply sms so people can't reply asking to skip! 

 
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You can just use your phone sms service for free instead as an option.
How can you do this please?

I like the app - I heard the stories of the past few years of glitches etc but I started using it this year and it's great.  It does everything you need it to, plus more. Lots of different types of reports available too, eg, new customers per month, financials etc.

Intuitive to use too.

 
The biggest issue I had was it would import every job as active even the 100's I no longer had on my rounds and they couldn't resolve this I also had jobs disappearing form the planner and the text field set up was a pain I couldn't just fill out the text I wanted I had to use apparent tokens this made it totally stupid in not been able to personalise certain texts this was 2 years ago in October so hopefully things have improved massively 

 
I like squeegee, but I don’t use the text features, lots of my customers said the texts weren’t coming thru. ?

I do love how simple it is to send invoices for commercial and holiday homes etc, but I am sure all the other software providers can do this also. 

I find you need to be fully committed to using it, when I first had it I would forget to tick things off or forget to put new jobs in. My own fault. Now everything goes into it and it is basically my boss, tells me what to do when. But I do get stressed when all my jobs are red because I’m behind, again! 

 
You can just use your phone sms service for free instead as an option. The difference is, due to permissions limitations on the Android OS (not sure about IOS), that if you want to use your device to send the text messages, it will send them one at a time to your messaging app, but you have to manually press send on each one. This is fine for invoicing after a clean, I actually prefer it as it gives you an extra opportunity to review and edit the message before it sends. But it can take a little longer if you have say 30 reminder texts to send out. Not too long though. 

Some prefer the text service though as I think it's a non reply sms so people can't reply asking to skip! 
Unfortunately this is no longer the case for new customers. They removed this feature because of the issue you mentioned with sending texts individually. So basically they kept it live for existing users that already used it but stopped it for new users.

In reply to the OP In all honesty I use the paid ones and love them. All my texts come through in my business name which I think looks great. They are 3.6p per text including VAT, and the premium plan is £9.80 pm. Compare that to CleanerPlanner which is £30 pm and 4.4p per text. At the end of the day it's an expense to right off against tax.

 
Unfortunately this is no longer the case for new customers. They removed this feature because of the issue you mentioned with sending texts individually. So basically they kept it live for existing users that already used it but stopped it for new users.

In reply to the OP In all honesty I use the paid ones and love them. All my texts come through in my business name which I think looks great. They are 3.6p per text including VAT, and the premium plan is £9.80 pm. Compare that to CleanerPlanner which is £30 pm and 4.4p per text. At the end of the day it's an expense to right off against tax.
Didn't realise that Liam, thanks 

 

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