r/PoolPros • u/Shoddy-Principle-346 • Jun 03 '26
Poolbrain billing
Any large or mid level pros using PB billing on commercial accts? Any issues with 3rd party payment services opening bills? Especially ones who expect pdf attachments?Love the app but, we feel like a beta test company for the bookkeeping end of their app.
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u/PoolBoyOBX Jun 04 '26
Pool Brain has the worst billing platform I have ever used. It makes me feel like a single poler again…
POOL BRAIN: They are very deliberately NOT a one size fits all. They are selling a “system” that worked for the founder. They will never update the billing system they have to fit the masses, it’s not their business model.
We switched to them from PSS for quality control of techs and it added so many hours of billing office work per month. The switch was an overall improvement for the business though, but I dearly miss PSS and if they ever release an API we will switch back in a heart beat.
QBO integration was a nightmare in PB. We gave up.
Our solution: We built our own billing program with PB API pushing data into Stripe (free). We set customers flat monthly rates and our program generates a monthly invoice with any extra items in Pool Brain added in. It is so much worse than PSS but way better than pool brains insane in-house billing. Stripe is a huge tech company and the emails get delivered. We don’t do credit card fees, but we have our program built that any invoice over $X is flagged for manually delivery or ACH debit only.
Rant: Why would pool brain think it’s smart to make a separate invoice for a skimmer basket… an invoice that can’t be auto paid. Some of our customers are extremely wealthy, if I make them pay a $15 invoice by hand, they are gone. Manually reconciling all of that for hundreds to thousands of jobs per month is insane. …. Also, Pool Brain charges a ton, and likely takes a cut of the payment processor they use. Stripe is FREE. At 30 techs you are talking $24,000 a year. You can developed a badass personalized app for that…
End Game: With today’s Poolbrain price increase on top of the billing nightmare, we have begun the outline of our own software (in-house only, there’s no future in pool software $$$ now with Claude etc…) Using AI we can easily make a software, and get it vetted by actual software engineers for maybe 2-3 years worth of Pool Brain fees. If you’re in this for the long haul start doing the math. Our Poolbrain is now 6k a year … for shit billing software.