Getting started: the whole path

Here’s the honest version of what it takes to move a pool route onto PoolHelm, in order, with a rough sense of how long each part takes. Nothing here is a surprise waiting for you further down.

Before you sign up, it helps to have three things within reach: a card (for the trial — you aren’t charged), a list of your customers exported from whatever you use now, and the names of the service packages you sell. None of them are required to start; they just make the first hour smoother.

1. Start your free trial — a few minutes. Sign up at poolhelm.com, enter a card, and you have 30 days of full access. See “Start your free trial.”

2. Walk the setup wizard — about 20 to 30 minutes. Nine steps: your business details, your card, your service levels, the days you service, your workflow templates, your team, your chemicals, your dosing formulas, and connecting Stripe so customers can pay you by card. You don’t have to make every setting perfect — you can come back to any of it from Settings. See “The setup wizard: what to expect.”

3. Bring your customers over — 10 minutes for an import, longer by hand. If you have an export from Skimmer, Jobber, Pool Brain, or QuickBooks, the import wizard reads it directly. Set up your service levels first so every customer lands with the right service already attached. See “Import your customer list.”

4. Build your week’s routes — one click, a couple of minutes to run. Build Best Routes assigns every active customer to a technician, a day, and a place in that day’s order. Then you look at it, drag anything you disagree with, and save. See “How PoolHelm builds your routes.”

5. Get your techs on their phones — 5 minutes each. Invite them from Settings → Team; they get an email, set a password, and sign in. There’s nothing to download — PoolHelm runs in a phone browser. See “Invite your team.”

6. Run a real day. Your techs work their routes; you watch the Today page. Every completed visit sends the customer a service report with the readings, the chemicals added, and the photos. This is the part that changes how your customers feel about you, and it happens without you doing anything.

7. Send your first invoice. PoolHelm drafts invoices from completed visits. You review and send; the customer pays by card on a Stripe page, or by check if that’s how they pay. See “How invoicing works.”

How long before it’s actually running? Most of the work is in one sitting — call it an hour and a half from signup to a built week of routes, if your customer list imports cleanly. The rest happens as your techs work.

What you should expect to be fiddly. Three things, and being straight about them saves you frustration. Some imported addresses won’t verify, and those customers wait rather than going on a route — deliberate, because PoolHelm would rather tell you than send a tech to a guess. Your chemical catalog arrives switched off on purpose, so nothing recommends a product you don’t stock. And customers don’t switch themselves on: once one has everything it needs PoolHelm marks it Ready, and you flip it live — one at a time, or all at once.

The order that matters. Service levels before importing customers, and chemicals before dosing formulas. Everything else you can do in whatever order suits you.

Start here: “Start your free trial.”