IceBossPro Blog — Ice Delivery Software

Onboarding New Accounts in Ice Delivery Software

Winning a new ice account is the exciting part. Setting it up correctly is the part that decides whether that account is profitable or a recurring headache. When a new convenience store, marina, or caterer signs on, a dozen details have to be captured accurately or the first delivery goes sideways — wrong freezer, wrong par, wrong bill. Doing this inside your ice delivery software turns onboarding from a memory exercise into a repeatable checklist that any office person can run the same way every time.

Start with the account record

Everything hangs off the customer record, so it gets built first. In IceBossPro that means name, billing contact, delivery contact, physical address, and any access notes — a gate code, a back-door delivery window, a receiving manager who is only in until noon. These are not trivia. The address anchors the account on the map for route building, and the access notes ride along to the driver's mobile app so the first delivery does not stall at a locked dock. Capturing them at onboarding is far cheaper than rediscovering them on a failed stop.

Map the freezers and merchandisers

Next, describe what you are actually servicing. Most ice accounts have one or more freezers or door-front merchandisers, and each one gets its own entry with a capacity. A gas station might have a single indoor bunker; a marina might have three dockside merchandisers. Setting them up individually matters because IceBossPro tracks restock at the unit level. You want to know that dock merchandiser two is the one that runs dry on holiday weekends, and you can only know that if it exists as its own record from day one.

Set par-levels honestly

The par-level is the amount you keep each freezer stocked to, and it is the single most important number in onboarding. Set it too low and the account runs out and calls angry. Set it too high and product melts or crowds their cooler. For a brand-new account you are estimating, so set a reasonable starting par based on the customer's traffic and flag it for review after the first few deliveries. IceBossPro's par-accuracy reporting will tell you within a couple of weeks whether your guess held, and you adjust from there. The point is to start with a real number, not a blank.

Build the standing order and schedule

Most ice accounts are recurring, so onboarding should end with a standing order and a delivery schedule, not a one-off. Decide the pack mix — how many 7lb and 20lb bags — and the frequency: twice weekly in summer, weekly in the shoulder season, on-call in winter. IceBossPro carries recurring schedules and standing orders as first-class records, so once you set them the account automatically appears on the right day's route with the right quantity loaded. That is the difference between an account that runs itself and one your dispatcher has to remember every week.

Choose the billing model up front

Ice gets billed three common ways, and picking the wrong one at onboarding causes months of cleanup. Per-delivery billing charges for what the truck drops each visit — clean for straightforward accounts. Recurring billing charges a set amount on a cycle — good for predictable, high-frequency customers. Consignment billing charges for what actually sold, reconciled each visit — common with larger retail and the most detail-heavy. IceBossPro supports all three per account, so you set the model once during onboarding and the auto-invoicing engine follows it from the first delivery forward.

Capture the card on file

The last setup step is payment. Getting a card on file through Stripe during onboarding — before the relationship has any friction — is the easiest it will ever be. From then on, invoices generated off completed deliveries charge automatically, and you have skipped the entire chase-the-check cycle for that account. Pair this with the customer portal, and the account can view and manage their own billing from the start, exactly as described in Reporting Dashboards Every Ice Delivery Operator Needs where those same invoices roll up into your receivables view.

Run the first delivery as a test

Treat the first delivery as onboarding's final exam. The driver gets the account on their route with the access notes, the freezers, the par, and the standing quantity all in the app. They deliver, capture proof of delivery and a signature, and note anything that did not match — the par was low, the gate code was wrong, the receiving manager wanted a different door. Those corrections flow back into the record, and by the second delivery the account is dialed in. Because everything was structured during setup, fixing it is editing a field, not rebuilding from scratch.

Why a repeatable workflow wins

The reason to run onboarding inside your ice delivery software rather than in someone's head is consistency. When every new account gets the same record, freezers, par, schedule, billing model, and card, your route data stays clean as you grow. The operators who scale from one truck to five are almost always the ones who made onboarding boring and identical — a checklist the software enforces, so the hundredth account is set up as carefully as the first.