A month in WastePro
The app has a lot of screens, but they aren’t all for you and they aren’t all for today. Almost everything falls into one of three rhythms: things you do daily, things you do once a month, and things you do now and then. This page walks the whole cycle once, so you can see where each screen sits before you learn any of them in detail.
You almost certainly won’t do all of this yourself. Ops people live in the daily screens, finance people live in the month-end ones. Read the lot anyway — knowing what happens either side of your part is what stops small mistakes travelling.
Every day
Look at the Dashboard
The Dashboard is your home screen. It won’t tell you what to do, but it tells you whether anything looks off — volumes, recycling rate, how hard the runs are working.
Make sure today’s work has a driver and a truck
Runs lists every day’s trip. The Unallocated card counts runs with no driver or no vehicle yet. Those are the ones that won’t happen.
Log the phone calls
A customer rings for an extra pickup that isn’t on their schedule. That’s an On-Call Request: log it against their service, then allocate it to a run so someone actually goes.
Work the Action Centre
The Action Centre is a live list of data problems — a completed job with no price, a run with no finish time, a futile with no reason. Clearing these daily is what keeps month-end short. The number in the sidebar is how many are waiting.
Every week or so
- Schedule the runs ahead. On a Route, Schedule runs generates a run for every due date across a range, honouring each service’s frequency. Doing this on the route beats creating runs one at a time.
- Check new records went in properly. New customers, new sites, new services — the Master List shows the whole book on one grid, which is the fastest way to spot a service with no rate or a 3PT service with no subcontractor named.
Month-end
This is the part with a fixed order, because each step depends on the one before it. Most of these screens open on last month by default, which is a good clue that they’re meant to be worked together, on the month you’re closing.
1. Load the subcontractors’ bills
Import 3PT Data is first, and it’s first for a reason. Subcontracted collections don’t exist in WastePro until their supplier’s invoice is uploaded, mapped and committed. Skip this and you’ll invoice a month with a chunk of the work missing — and you won’t be told.
Work one subcontractor at a time. Every line has to land in one of two places: committed, or consciously left out.
2. Review the month’s jobs
Bookings Review puts every job in the month on one spreadsheet-style grid. This is the quality check before money moves: right weights, right quantities, futiles recorded with a reason, prices present.
Work the Review status queue down from Not Started to Complete so you can tell what’s been looked at.
3. Clear anything blocking billing
Back to the Action Centre, specifically the two lanes at the top:
- No pricing — jobs whose price won’t resolve. They drop straight out of the export.
- No job data — completed bookings with no job attached. Same result.
The red banner counts exactly these. Get it to zero.
4. Send the customer invoices
Xero Invoice Export turns the month’s billable work into the file you import into Xero. Check the Rows without pricing tile before you download — that’s your last chance to catch work that would go out at $0.
5. Pay the subcontractors
Xero Bill Export is the other half of the same month: what your suppliers billed you, checked against what their contracted rates say it should have cost, then pushed to Xero as draft bills.
6. Chase what’s owed
Receivables reads live from Xero and shows who’s overdue, by how long. Where a customer has stopped paying, you can place a service stop from here.
The order matters most between steps 1 and 4. Subcontracted work loaded after you’ve exported the month’s invoices is work you’ve already failed to bill for — and correcting it means credit notes rather than an edit.
Now and then
| When | What | Where |
|---|---|---|
| A new customer signs | Add the customer, its sites and its services — or bulk-import them | Customers, Sites & Services |
| Prices go up | Model the increase, check the revenue impact, then apply it | Uprate Worksheet |
| A supplier changes their prices | Update their buy rates so margin stays honest | Suppliers |
| Someone joins or leaves | Invite them, or set them to Pending | Users & roles |
| Your cost assumptions change | Driver hourly rate, disposal cost per tonne | Assumption Base |
| A building needs its waste data | Produce the NABERS extract | NABERS waste export |
| A question no report answers | Build one | Report Builder |
The one habit worth forming
Most problems in WastePro are the same problem: a collection happened, but something about the record stops it billing. No price, no job, no weight, no supplier named.
Every one of those shows up in the Action Centre the moment it exists, and every one is cheap to fix that day and expensive to fix at month-end. If you take one working habit from this guide, make it opening the Action Centre each morning.
Next: Finding your way around — where each of these screens lives in the menu.