Help Center
How to use Pool Founder — from your first customer import to routes, billing, the technician app, and the phone line that answers for you.
Getting Started
Set up your account, import your customer book, and get your first routes running.
Quick start guideMove your book of business into Pool Founder with guided setup: team, job templates, your book (customers + pools + jobs), and routes.
Verify your phone or emailA verified phone number or email address is what unlocks sending invoices and quotes, texting customers, taking payments, and inviting teammates. Here is how to verify yours.
The Overview dashboardWhat every card, chip, chart, and tab on the Overview means — attention items, live route progress, the money row, and the finish-setting-up checklist.
Import your customersBring your whole customer book into Pool Founder from a CSV or Excel file, a screenshot of your old software, or QuickBooks Online — customers, pool locations, and service jobs in one pass.
Set up service in bulkApply one job template to many service locations at once — with per-row overrides for rate, preferred day, preferred technician, and visits per week.
Meet GeorgeGeorge is the help desk built into the Pool Founder web dashboard — ask him about customers, schedules, routes, gate codes, and invoices, get step-by-step directions, or ask to speak to a human.
Book a setup callGet a free onboarding call with a Pool Founder co-founder — book a time online, get a Zoom link by email, and reschedule or cancel any time.
Customers & Leads
Manage customers, service locations, the customer portal, incoming leads, and your Google reviews.
Add and manage customersAdd customers one at a time or on the fly from a work order, find your way around the customer page, set a billing address for invoices that go to a PO box or somewhere other than the pool, look up customers on the technician app, call customers from your browser, and archive the ones you no longer service.
Service locations and poolsHow service locations work: multiple addresses per customer, on-site contacts, bodies of water with gallons, chemistry settings, equipment and warranty tracking, and reusable pool templates.
The customer portalHow your customers sign in with just their email and a 6-digit code, the visibility toggles you control, service requests, self-service billing and AutoPay, quote responses, and the customer mobile app.
LeadsEvery prospective customer in one place — captured by your phone assistant, submitted through your website, or added by hand — with the calls, texts, and scheduling proposals tied to each one.
Route FitRanked route options and a suggested per-visit rate on every new lead, on the web dashboard and in the technician mobile app — which day and technician the stop is cheapest to add to, what to charge for it, and one button that creates the customer, the job, and the route stop.
Lead pool detailsRecord the bodies of water a lead is asking about — pool, spa, or hot tub with its gallons, sanitizer, and surface — so the Route Fit suggested rate estimates chemicals from comparable pools you already service. The lead's gallons, sanitizer, and surface carry onto the customer's service location when you convert.
Job feedbackEvery service report email asks customers how the visit went. Their thumbs up, thumbs down, and comments land on the Job Feedback page — with satisfaction and response-rate stats and a per-technician breakdown.
Google reviews & your business profileConnect your Google Business Profile to see every review in Pool Founder, reply without leaving the dashboard, get notified of new reviews, and work through weekly AI coaching tasks that strengthen your listing.
Routes & Scheduling
Build routes, create jobs, move stops between technicians, and handle missed visits.
Create jobsCreate recurring maintenance jobs and one-time work orders, start from job templates, and attach task checklists for your technicians.
Build and optimize routesAssign jobs to technicians and days with the drag-and-drop Route Builder, auto-assign and rebalance routes, and optimize stop order with Google Maps.
Transfer and move jobsMove jobs to another technician or day — temporarily for one date or permanently onto a new weekly route — even while a route is being run.
Reschedule missed stopsWhat happens when a route is left running overnight, and how to move missed or skipped stops to another technician or day in one step.
Unplanned and open stopsCreate lightweight to-do stops with just a note and an address — leave them open for any technician, or pin them to a route — and invoice them after completion.
Pause, skip, and archive jobsSkip a single visit, suspend a job indefinitely, or archive it entirely — and restore an archived job later without losing any history.
Log a past completionRecord visits that happened outside the app from the web dashboard — backdate completions with technician, tasks, chemicals, parts, and photos — and browse every completed stop in one ledger.
Admin route toolsWatch technicians live on the Field Operations map, skip stops or force-complete routes from the office, start and complete routes on behalf of a tech, and audit every schedule change in Schedule History.
Billing & Payments
Invoices, billing modes, online payments, quotes, and your Pool Founder subscription.
Maintenance billing modesHow recurring maintenance jobs bill in Pool Founder: per visit, monthly or weekly flat rate, or externally — plus the Maintenance Billing worklist, recurring line items, queued one-off charges (including work orders added to the next maintenance invoice), chemical billing, and seasonal schedules.
Create and manage invoicesCreate and send invoices, edit and refund them, charge saved cards, copy payment links, and configure invoice emails, reminder cadences, auto-retry, and write-offs.
Accept online paymentsConnect Stripe to take card, debit, and ACH payments with autopay, pass the card fee to customers where allowed, request cards on file by email, and show Pay by Zelle on invoices.
Reconcile bank depositsMatch every Stripe deposit in your bank account to the customer payments inside it — per-customer breakdown with invoice links, fees itemized, and a CSV export for your bookkeeper.
Record and void manual paymentsRecord cash, check, and Zelle payments on invoices — and void a payment that was mis-keyed or applied to the wrong invoice, without losing the paper trail.
Work order billing and depositsHow one-time work orders get billed: requiring a deposit before work begins, invoicing from the Work Order Billing page, bulk Invoice All, Mark as Billed, and Add to Next Maintenance Invoice — putting a repair on the customer's next monthly bill instead of sending its own invoice.
Consolidated billingBundle a customer's maintenance jobs into one invoice on a customer-level monthly or weekly schedule — enrollment, fee passing, billing without visits, and how the rollup bills.
Tips and gratuitiesLet customers tip your technicians from service report emails, the invoice pay page, and the customer portal — then track what each tech is owed and mark tips paid out.
QuotesCreate and send quotes your customers can accept online, track them through draft, sent, accepted, and rejected, and convert accepted quotes into work orders or maintenance jobs — with deposits, discounts, chemical billing, and QuickBooks Estimate sync.
Plans and your subscriptionHow Pool Founder pricing works — your plan scales automatically with your technician count, with unlimited everything else — plus the 30-day trial, the business line add-on, and managing the card on your subscription.
Technician Mobile App
Everything technicians do in the field — routes, visit completion, and field actions.
Run your routeHow the Route tab works in the technician app: starting and finishing the route, the odometer modal, pausing, how to re-optimize your remaining stops mid-route from your current location, transfers, per-stop arrival estimates, mileage trips, and working offline.
Complete a visitEverything on the mobile completion screen: task views, checklists, test-strip scanning, water chemistry with automatic LSI, chemicals and parts, the Extras step, voice fill, editing completed visits, and sharing your work.
Chemical dosing recommendationsThe mobile app tells technicians how much chlorine, acid, or other chemicals to add after a reading: enter or scan the water chemistry and get a recommended dose plan, scaled to the pool's volume and each product's strength. Where the amounts come from, how salt vs. chlorine pools are handled, contraindicated products, and what happens when pool data is missing.
Work orders and unplanned stops in the fieldCreate work orders, maintenance jobs, customers, bodies of water, and vehicles from the truck; add unplanned stops; pick up open stops; and manage job tasks and notes in the field.
Invoices and leads from the fieldCreate, send, edit, and charge invoices from the truck, send quotes, bill purchased chemicals to the next invoice, and work the whole leads pipeline — capture a prospect with your GPS, see which route day fits and what to charge, and convert them in one step — all from the technician mobile app.
Account and settings on mobileThe Account screen in the technician app: map provider, task view modes, call forwarding, the share prompt, push notifications and quiet hours, the notifications feed, and reporting issues.
Phone, Texting & Email
Your business line, the AI assistant that answers calls, texting, email, and service reports.
Set up your business phoneChoose between free call forwarding on the number you already have and a $25/mo business line of your own, then get your calls answered around the clock.
The AI phone assistantHow the Live Assistant answers your calls 24/7 — setup, what it can and can't do, urgent messages, privacy guarantees, and the settings you control.
Texting and the Phone inboxEvery call and text on your business line in one inbox — reply, approve assistant drafts, send photos, set up the six automated texts including lead follow-up sequences, and manage carrier registration. Turn on the on-the-way and invoice-ready texts even without a business phone line: they go out on the shared toll-free number. Add the review link the review request text sends right on its row.
Text broadcastsText one service update — a rain delay, a route change, a closure — to a filtered group of your customers, with a live count of who can actually receive it and a per-recipient record afterwards.
Email, your domain, and blastsTrack every customer email with delivery, open, and click data, send from your own domain, and reach your whole customer list with one-off email blasts.
Service reportsConfigure the automatic after-visit email customers receive, resend a report for any visit, and collect customer feedback and optional tips.
Portal messagesTriage service requests customers send from their portal — statuses, assignment, AI-suggested replies, internal notes, and one-click job or quote creation.
Team & Permissions
Employees, time tracking, payroll, vehicles, and role-based permissions.
Employees, time tracking, and payrollAdd employees, track hours and mileage automatically from the mobile app, run payroll summaries, and set up vehicle costs so your profitability numbers are true.
Roles and permissionsGive each employee a role with granular permissions — build custom roles, clone existing ones, and see exactly which permission gates each feature.
Settings & Analytics
Task templates, water chemistry, alerts, profitability, QuickBooks, the API, and referrals.
Task templates and groupsBuild reusable checklists for visits, repeat tasks every N weeks, make tasks required, and keep many jobs in sync with task groups and job templates.
Water chemistry settingsChoose which water-chemistry parameters technicians record, which are required, their order and default values — and add your own custom measurements like ORP or borates.
Chemistry trends on a poolSee every water test for a pool charted over time against its target range, including LSI with its status colors — on the body of water's page and on the service location page.
Technician AlertsOne queue for problems technicians report from the field and automatic alerts from completed visits — chemistry out of range, unusual time on job, abnormal chemical usage.
Profitability analyticsSee revenue, costs, and margin by day, week, or month and by job, customer, route, and technician — plus revenue and profit per hour, gross vs net profit, vehicle costs, and recurring revenue (MRR).
QuickBooks syncConnect QuickBooks Online, import customers and items, tune what syncs (invoices, payments, refunds, quotes, products, Stripe fees), and monitor sync activity.
API keys and the Leads APICreate and revoke API keys, authenticate with Bearer tokens, and push leads into Pool Founder from Zapier or your own code with the Create Lead endpoint — including the smsConsent flag that lets follow-up texts reach a web lead.
Referral programsTwo programs on one page: refer another pool company to Pool Founder and earn $150 cash, or run your own program that credits customers for referring neighbors.
Manage your chemicals inventorySet customer prices and a per-chemical sales tax rate, track real costs for every chemical, keep stock counts accurate with restocks, and control billing with the Always Charge toggle.
Chemical usage and cost analyticsSee how much of each chemical you are using, what it cost you, what customers were billed, and the margin — on a chemical's Insights tab, the Chemicals tab of Profitability, and on customer, job, location, and pool pages.
Manage your parts inventoryKeep a catalog of replacement parts with customer prices, weighted-average costs, low-stock alerts, and a full restock and purchase history.
Add your brandingUpload your logo and pick brand colors once — they appear on quotes, invoices, the customer portal, and service report emails automatically.
Notification settingsControl how Pool Founder reaches you — push and email channels, category toggles, overnight quiet hours, a daily digest email, and the in-app notification feed.