Chris asked for three things: cleaning dates on each customer, a reminder the night before, and a daily list of who's on the clean. This is what that changes. Read the middle lane — almost everything Chris does by hand is work the system already has the data to do for him.
Everything from the booking onwards is Chris and a spreadsheet with sixteen tabs. The customer tells us exactly when each of their bins goes out, and then that answer gets re-typed into Excel and worked out again by hand.
Fills in the sign-up form
Postcode, bins, and for each bin: the day it goes out, how often, and roughly what time.Pays by card
Subscription starts.Saves the booking
Including every bin's collection day, frequency and time.Takes the payment, marks them active
Emails the customer, alerts Chris
Reads the new booking in the CMS
Re-types it onto the Sorting sheet
Works out which weekday each bin goes out
Works out whether it's a week 1 or week 2 bin
General one week, recycling the next.Adds a row to every round tab that customer touches
Up to four of them, if their bins go out on different days.Adds them to the master lists as well
The same person, kept in three places.Opens the right tab for today
Correct weekday, correct week.Works out the driving order in his head
There's a Route Number column. It has never been filled in.Types the date into a cell, after the last one
One cell holding a comma-separated list of every clean.Checked against the live system: of Chris's 139 active subscribers, 129 are correctly on a round, and not one non-payer is being cleaned. He keeps it accurate — and that's the point. The cost isn't mistakes, it's the hours spent preventing them, and a way of working that can't stretch to twice the size.
Nothing changes about signing up or getting paid. What changes is that the collection dates the customer already gives us get used: projected forward into actual cleans, sorted onto the right day, and reminded on the night before.
Fills in the same sign-up form
No change to the thing that already works.Pays by card
Gets a reminder the evening before
"Your bins are being cleaned tomorrow — please leave them out."Saves the booking, takes payment, sends the welcome
Works out every future clean from the dates already given
Each bin rolled forward by how often the council empties it.Puts each clean on the right day and week automatically
The job that currently means picking the right tab.Messages tomorrow's customers every evening
Email now; text for anyone who's agreed to be texted.Redoes the schedule when someone changes bins, pauses or cancels
No stale rows left behind.Opens Today on his phone
The round is already there, already in order.Drags the stops into driving order
It sticks. That's the empty Route Number column, finally filled.Ticks each one off as he goes
| The job | Today | After |
|---|---|---|
| A new customer joins | Re-typed onto the Sorting sheet, then onto up to four round tabs, then onto the master lists. | Nothing to do. Their cleans appear on the right days by themselves. |
| Knowing who's on today | Open the correct tab for the weekday and the week, and read down it. | Open Today on your phone. One screen, already filtered. |
| Driving order | Worked out fresh each morning, in his head. | Set once by dragging, then reused every cycle. |
| Recording a clean | Type today's date into a cell after the previous dates. | Tick it off, with the date and time kept automatically. |
| Reminding customers | Doesn't happen. | Sent automatically the evening before. |
| Someone pauses or cancels | Find and remove them from every tab they appear on. | Comes off the rounds by itself. |
| Adding two more round weeks | Ten more tabs to build and keep in step. | A setting, not a rebuild. |