If you run a waste collection business, you probably know how tough it gets getting customers to pay on time—the endless phone calls, the back-and-forth over missed pickups, reconciling payment records with complaints, and all the other challenges that come with the job.
When I started my waste collection company in Kampala, Uganda, back in 2018, I invested about USD 40,000 to purchase two trucks and began aggressively signing up customers in the communities I served. By 2021, we were serving around 400 customers monthly, and that number grew to about 1,200 by 2022.
It quickly dawned on me that while I was focused on growing our customer base, I wasn’t paying enough attention to whether those customers were actually paying on time. If you’re in the same situation, this might sound familiar—you have 1,000+ homes and small businesses, each with their own billing cycle. Every customer expects to be invoiced exactly on their end-of-month date, not a day earlier. It became a nightmare to manage.
I brought in a finance consultant who helped create a detailed Excel sheet to track customer payments. It was organized by month, but we still struggled because everyone had different billing dates—it just wasn’t scalable.
With my background in software development, I knew there had to be a better way. That’s when I built WasteTitan—a software platform made by waste haulers for waste haulers, designed to simplify tasks like debt collection, invoicing, and more.
Here’s what WasteTitan does:
1. Automated Invoicing
When registering a new customer, you can set up their billing preferences right away. Or you can configure default billing settings under the company’s account. WasteTitan uses these settings to generate invoices automatically—no manual entry needed.
2. Debt Collection Call Tracking
If you’ve ever done debt collection, you know it involves calling every customer who hasn’t paid—but after a few calls, it’s easy to lose track. WasteTitan keeps logs of all your calls and organizes them, so follow-ups are easy. You can filter customers by who promised to pay today, who didn’t answer, and more.
3. Debt Records and Filtering
The platform also tracks all unpaid balances by customer, service area, pickup day, and more. You can quickly filter out outstanding debts and see exactly where the problems are.
This system has made managing debt in our operations so much easier, and it’s been a game-changer for my business. I hope it helps you too.
You can try it out with a free trial at https://app.wastetitan.io/.
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