IceBossPro Blog — Ice Delivery Scheduling

Onboarding Accounts in Ice Scheduling Software

The day you switch to real ice delivery scheduling software lives or dies on onboarding. A platform can have the best standing-order engine on the market, but if getting your accounts into it feels like re-typing your whole business, you will give up in week one. Done right, onboarding is a one-time setup that hands you a calendar which then runs itself for years. This post walks through how we onboard accounts — import the list, then set each one's standing order, frequency, route day, and par — the same way we would set up a route we actually had to drive.

Start with a clean account import

Onboarding begins with getting every account into the system, and you do not do that one form at a time. Export whatever list you have — a spreadsheet, an old invoicing file, even a hand-typed roster — and import it in bulk so the software creates every account, address, and contact at once. The goal of the import is coverage, not perfection: get all hundred stops in the door with names and locations correct, and leave the scheduling details for the next pass. An import that lands your full account list in minutes is what makes the rest of onboarding feel like tuning rather than data entry.

Set the standing order on every account

Once the accounts exist, the heart of onboarding is attaching a standing order to each one. This is the single rule that tells the software an account repeats: this store gets serviced, on this cadence, to this level, indefinitely. Go account by account and set it once. It feels like the slow part, but it is the whole investment — every standing order you set now is a delivery you will never have to create again. When you finish, the default state of the entire route becomes "always scheduled," and your ongoing work shrinks to managing exceptions instead of building the calendar every week.

Choose a frequency that matches the burn

For each standing order, set a frequency that reflects how fast the account actually moves ice. A busy bar might be twice a week, a slow office cooler every other week, a convenience store every three days in season. If you already know the number from experience, enter it. If you do not, start with your best guess and let par-driven auto-scheduling refine it — the platform learns the burn rate over a few cycles and tightens or loosens the frequency for you. The point of onboarding is not to get every frequency perfect on day one; it is to get a defensible starting number on every account so nothing is left unscheduled.

Assign a route day and driver

Scheduling is only useful if stops land on days that make geographic sense, so during onboarding you assign each account a route day and, if you run more than one truck, a driver. Group accounts by area onto the same day: everything on the east side on Tuesday, the downtown cluster on Thursday. As you assign, watch the per-day load so no single day gets stacked past what one truck can carry. This is where onboarding quietly builds your capacity plan — by the time every account has a route day, you can see your whole week balanced across trucks before a single delivery has run.

Set the par-level for each location

The last detail on each account is its par-level — the amount of ice you want present after a restock. Par is what turns a dumb calendar into par-driven scheduling: paired with the burn rate the system learns, it decides both how much to drop and how often the stop truly needs to happen. Set par per freezer or merchandiser during onboarding, using the physical capacity of the box and how full you like to leave it. Get this in early and the software starts optimizing frequency for you as the season shifts, pulling summer visits sooner without anyone re-sequencing the route by hand.

Handle the exceptions up front

While the account is open, capture its quirks so the calendar is honest from day one. A bar that opens at noon gets a delivery window. An account that closes for the winter gets a seasonal hold ready to apply. A stop with a standing skip on holidays gets that noted. Loading these during onboarding means the schedule reflects reality the first time it runs, instead of you overriding it by hand for a month while the software "learns" things you already knew.

Verify the first week before you trust it

When onboarding is done, do not just flip it on — open the delivery calendar and read the first full week. Confirm every account landed on a sensible day, no truck is overloaded, and the frequencies look right against what you know. This review is fast because the standing orders did the heavy lifting, and it is the moment onboarding pays off: from here the schedule generates itself. For more, see Choosing Ice Delivery Scheduling Software.

Onboarding is a one-time cost

The effort of onboarding lands once, and everything after it is maintenance. IceBossPro was built by people who have actually run ice routes, so the setup flow matches how you already think about your accounts — import them, give each a standing order, a frequency, a route day, and a par, and let the calendar run. Do it carefully once and you buy yourself years of a schedule that never forgets a stop.