Custom CRM Development: VP Cleaning Services

The owner of VP Cleaning Services — a Canadian-based, professional janitorial force that tackles residential, corporate, and industrial jobs — approached us with a challenge: create an easy-to-use administrative back end, custom CRM Development for cleaners and clients. She envisioned it being a portal where workers, customers, and management could track jobs, plan appointments, and keep property notes.

Technological Foundation: CodeIgniter Framework

After careful consideration, our development team settled on CodeIgniter as a foundational programming platform. A highly secure and lightweight PHP framework that’s loosely based on the model–view–controller architectural software pattern, CodeIgniter is a developer’s dream for projects that must accommodate multi-type user interfaces, like VP Cleaning’s project.

Calendaring

Scheduling is a core aspect of VP Cleaning’s business. For the company to succeed, cleaners need to know where they’re going and when, and customers must be able to post jobs and deadlines. To tackle the task, we started with FullCalendar, an open-source JavaScript event calendar, as a base, and then we amended tailored programming solutions for more customization flexibility. The finished product allows for filtering by employee, order status, date, and customer history. Employees and management can also block off days and times that they’re unavailable, like vacation weeks and holiday closures.

Administrator Employee Management System

The portal also includes a section that only the owner and authorized management can access. It tracks employee activity, status, and job history. A handy tool, VP Cleaning’s management database gives executives an on-demand snapshot of their business’ many employees.

Administrator Customer Management System

Similar to the admin-only employee management portal, VP’s custom solution also includes a customer management system. Like its staff counterpart, each customer has a profile account that tracks order history and reputation score.

Online Booking

Our team’s biggest obstacle was creating an easy-to-use, rock-solid, front-facing online booking system that allows customers to post-cleaning job orders and pay for services rendered. To satisfy the request, we programmed a custom solution using PayPal’s API. Similar to the employee and customer management portals, the online booking feature allows for filtering by an employee, order status, customer, and date. Additionally, it features report printing capabilities, duplicate order checking, and automated recurring order options.

Promotions Portal

Sales are a great tool to drive business, which is why VP Cleaning Services wanted to incorporate a promotional code feature into their system that would automatically apply discounts at checkout. Administrators can add an infinite amount of promotions to the system on their own, including the ability to name the promotion, set a code, date range, and percent discount.