TreeBossPro Blog — Plant Health Care

Building a PHC Product List With EPA Registration Numbers

Ask three applicators to write down the product they used this morning and you may get three different spellings, one trade name, one active ingredient and one "the blue jug." That is fine in conversation and terrible in a record. A product list fixes it at the source. Build it once, with the EPA registration number on every entry, and every application, mix and report afterward starts from the same clean data.

Start With What Is Actually on Your Shelf

PHC Application Records: What Every Tree Company Should Log on Each Treatment explains what belongs on each application record. Most of those fields depend on the product being identified correctly, which is why the product list comes first.

Walk the shop and the trucks. Write down every product your PHC crews actually use: insecticides, fungicides, horticultural oils, fertilizers, soil amendments, growth regulators, injection products. Include the seasonal ones that only come out once a year, because those are exactly the ones nobody remembers how to record. Do not build the list from a catalog of things you might use someday; build it from the labels in hand.

Why the EPA Registration Number Belongs on Every Entry

Registered pesticide products carry an EPA registration number on the label. Trade names change, distributors relabel, and two products can have confusingly similar names. The registration number is the stable identifier. Putting it on the product entry in TreeBossPro means every application record that uses that product carries it automatically.

Copy the number directly from the current label rather than from an old invoice or a website listing, and double-check it when you restock, since a supplier change can mean a different registered product. Not every item on your list will have one; a fertilizer that is not a registered pesticide, for example, may not. Record what is on the label. If you are unsure what your jurisdiction requires you to record for a given product, ask your state's regulatory agency.

One practical tip: when a product arrives in a new container size or from a new distributor, compare the registration number on the new label to the one on your list before assuming it is the same product. Similar trade names and private-label versions are common. Two minutes at the receiving bench prevents a season of records that point to the wrong entry.

Naming Products So Applicators Pick the Right One

The product name on your list is what an applicator sees in the field, so make it obvious. Use the trade name as it appears on the label, and if you carry two formulations of similar products, make the difference visible in the name. An applicator scrolling a list at the truck should never have to guess.

Retire products you no longer stock instead of leaving them on the list forever. A short, current list is easier to pick from and produces cleaner reports. Historical records still keep the product they were made with.

From Products to Mixes

Once products are in, build your mixes. A mix is a saved combination your crews use repeatedly, like your standard dormant oil round or your fall fertilization. Saving mixes keeps every applicator on the same recipe and makes recording quick: pick the mix, record the rate and amount used, move on.

Build every mix from what the labels allow, including any compatibility and mixing instructions. The software stores the recipe your company decides on; it does not check it against the label, so that responsibility stays with your licensed people.

It is worth keeping your mixes few and clear. A company with forty mixes usually has five real recipes and thirty-five variations that crept in. Every unnecessary mix is another chance for an applicator to pick the wrong one at the truck.

Keeping the List Current Through the Season

Assign one person to own the product list. New product comes in, they add it with its registration number before it goes on a truck. A product is discontinued or swapped, they update the list. This takes a few minutes a month and saves hours of cleanup.

It also helps to review the list before each season starts. Check that each entry matches what is on the shelf now, confirm registration numbers against current labels, and update your mixes if your program changed over the winter.

Ownership also means someone checks the list against reality. Once or twice a season, compare what is on the trucks and the shelf to what is in the system. Anything on a truck that is not on the list is a product someone will eventually record as free text, or not record at all.

If you run more than one PHC truck, consider whether every truck carries every product. Often it makes sense for certain specialty products, like injection materials, to ride only with the applicators who use them. That keeps the field list relevant and reduces the chance of an unfamiliar product being used without the right training.

What a Good Product List Gives You Later

The payoff comes at reporting time. Because every application points to a product on the list, the chemical tracking report can show you everything applied by product, by property or by date range. You can see which products moved the most volume, which properties used what, and which applicators applied which products. None of that works if product names are free text.

The product list is one piece of the bigger plant health care software setup in TreeBossPro. Next in this series: building mixes that keep every applicator on the same recipe.