Why the right software is critical to success in the waste management business.
People that come to the waste management business with a background in waste hauling or recycling, often think of it as a service business. So it’s no wonder that choosing business software is often a second-thought. However, with the vast amount of data that needs to be managed, processed, and analyzed, not to mention far greater customer demands, waste management is really more of an information management business.
Unlike waste hauling or recycling, without an effective software platform, it’s nearly impossible to add customers without exponentially increasing your overhead costs, making it much harder to achieve sustaining revenue. And even if you had the staff to maintain data in spreadsheets, you would still not be able to easily produce reports or benchmark analytics without considerable time and effort.
Even for start-ups, leveraging the right business software can quickly generate ROI, not only making it much easier to scale your business, but also instilling best practices and offering credibility with prospective clients that can provide you with a competitive advantage.
Here are the top 5 reasons the right software is critical to success in the waste brokerage:
1. Managing Accounts & Haulers
With the business volume needed to sustain revenue and growth, waste brokers must ultimately manage and control very large sets of data regarding equipment, haulers, and related service costs for hundreds of customers and their numerous locations, not to mention data management operations such as bulk price or equipment changes, data loading, or extraction. While most of this can be tracked in spreadsheets, the effort of analyzing or successfully sifting through this amount of data puts a considerable strain on you or your back office, and rarely translates into anything meaningful.
2. Tracking Services
Waste brokers need to track both scheduled (recurring) services and on-demand services requests from customers. While it’s possible to manage all this with off-the-shelf call tracking software (which many do) these solutions will not make the hauler audit process any easier, nor will it generate billing or integrate with accounting software, leaving you with manual work that will be become difficult to keep up with.
3. Reconciling Hauler Bills
Reconciling service bills from haulers is one of the most difficult and time consuming aspects of the waste brokerage business. This is often seen as a limiting factor for operations that are trying to scale their volume, but without the proper software. The right software solution can have a big impact on your operation by making it much easier to match-up service charges with recurring and on-demand services, helping to reduce mistakes, eliminate double-entry with accounting, and ultimately relieving stress on your back office.
4. Meeting Customer Demands
Taking on national accounts and other large customers are essential to long term growth. But handling the volume while also meeting demands like custom reporting, custom data integration or benchmarking reports can be difficult and very time intensive, especially if you’re still operating from spreadsheets. Integrated business software will not only let you easily support these specialized needs but also offers vital credibility when talking to prospective customers, especially larger accounts.
5. Billing Calculations
Month-end billing calculations such as brokerage price markups, management fees or shared savings formulas can easily become a difficult and error prone task that only gets tougher as you expand. Using specialized software not only saves time and improves accuracy but can also make it possible to support more complicated scenarios that could help secure more business opportunities.
Conclusion
With massive volumes of data, difficult auditing requirements, and tough customer demands, choosing the right business software platform is vital to success in the waste brokerage business, even for startups. Working with an IT partner that understands the unique industry challenges and that has a proven solution can help minimize project risk and offer an opportunity to leverage their experience to your advantage
cieTrade offers a comprehensive waste management and brokerage solution that’s integral with trading and recycling software. For more information, or to request a one-on-one demo, send us an email at support@cietrade.com