Grease trap work is the steadiest book in pumping. The restaurants are on a city schedule, the schedule does not move, and the fines for missing it are the restaurant's problem, which makes them yours if you are the one who did not show up. It is also the easiest book to run badly, because every account is on a different interval and the restaurant manager has no idea when the last pump was.
The interval is per trap, and the city often sets it
Many municipal pretreatment programs set a pumping rule, commonly a rule based on how full the trap is, a quarter of its depth in grease and solids being the usual trigger, and some set a fixed maximum interval. A 1,000-gallon interceptor behind a slow cafe and a 50-gallon under-sink trap in a busy fryer kitchen are months apart. Put the interval on the site, not the customer, because one restaurant group can have five traps on five schedules.
Then correct the interval from what you find. A trap that is at a quarter full at 60 days should move to 45. A trap that is nearly empty at 90 can stretch. Record the condition at every pump, the way a septic pumper records gallons, and the schedule tunes itself.
The report you run every Monday
The one screen that runs a grease book is a list of every site with its last service date, its interval, and how many days it has gone, sorted overdue first. Monday morning, read down from the top: overdue sites get booked this week, sites due in the next two weeks get a call, and nothing else needs attention. If a site shows an interval but no last service, it is a new account that has never been pumped, and it goes to the top too.
That report is only as good as the last-service date on each site, which is why the date should be written by the completed job and nothing else. A date somebody typed in by hand in March is a date that will be wrong in June.
The manifest and the service record
Two documents come out of every grease pump-out. The manifest goes with the load: the generator, the gallons, the hauler and the disposal site, in whatever form your state and the disposal site require. The service record goes to the restaurant: date, gallons removed, condition of the trap, the disposal site, and the driver's name. Many cities require the restaurant to keep that record on site for the inspector, so it should be a clean PDF the manager can print, and it should go to the restaurant the day the job completes, not at the end of the month with the invoice.
Attach the photos. A before-and-after of the trap with the time stamped on the image is the record that ends an argument about whether the trap was pumped. The proof of service post covers what makes a photo evidence.
Disposal is the cost line
Brown grease does not go everywhere septage goes, and where it does go it is often priced differently. Keep the disposal site on each job, keep the site's rate on the site, and let the job's gallons and the site's rate produce the disposal cost. A grease book with disposal costs you cannot see per job is a book where the margin is a guess.
Billing a restaurant group
Five restaurants under one owner want one invoice per restaurant, each with its own trap and its own service dates, sent to one accounts payable address. That is the same per-site invoicing a parks department wants; the municipal billing post describes it. Price per pump with the gallons shown, or a flat monthly service fee for the ones on a fixed schedule; both work, as long as the invoice names the trap and the date.
Licensing
Your pumper license may or may not cover grease, and the disposal rules for it may sit under a different program. The state licensing post explains where to look, and the state pages link the forms.
