How to Automate DRB
DRB's Patheon texts members about failed plan payments, receipts and expirations, and Catalyst runs email and text campaigns from visit and membership data. Working failed payments oldest first, offering plans to retail regulars and drafting fleet invoices still take a person in the Patheon Portal; WebRun, an AI agent, can do that reading and leave drafts for approval.
Written by
Hannah Vogel
Finance operations
Reviewed by
Priya Raghavan
Solutions lead
DRB's point of sale runs the pay station, the plan members and the tunnel queue
DRB, a Vontier company, makes car wash technology: Patheon, or the older, Windows-based SiteWatch, at tunnel washes, and separate In-Bay Solutions for unattended washes. DRB's POS does far more than take cards. It sells unlimited monthly wash plans, recognizes members by AI-powered license plate recognition or an RFID tag, and queues cars into the tunnel. Patheon eCommerce, the Essential Web App, takes purchases online as well.
The site manager follows the day on Patheon's dashboards, site by site. The marketing manager runs campaigns in Catalyst, members manage their plans in a branded Beacon app, and the bookkeeper bills the house and fleet accounts that local businesses run up at the wash.
A wash plan pays only while the card on file works
Every month some recharges fail, and each failure sends the member Patheon's automatic message. The members still failing a week later are the manager's to chase, the longest-lapsed first, before a regular who washes twice a week drifts off the plan.
Other customers come back three or four times a month and pay for each wash at the pay station, and nobody has offered them a plan that matches the package they keep buying.
Fleet accounts close out monthly. A car dealership or a delivery company runs washes onto its account all month, and at the start of the next the bookkeeper totals each account's washes at its contracted rates and builds the invoice, vehicle by vehicle and wash type by wash type, checking any account whose total jumped from the month before.
Patheon messages the member when a plan payment fails
Patheon's Customer Notifications send members automatic texts and emails, including one when a plan payment fails and another when a plan is about to expire. Patheon stores more than one card on file for a plan member, and SiteWatch's EMV payments come with a Card Account Updater that checks daily for updated cards on file. Catalyst, a Patheon add-on synced with it, segments customers by visit data, purchase history and membership status, and runs logic-based drip campaigns by email and text that start from a visit or a purchase.
Patheon's dashboards cover car count, sales per car, cars per labor hour and plans sold and lost for each site, and DRB says they now load up to 85 percent faster. SiteWatch adds Alerts & Bulletins with key sales and labor figures and a QuickBooks interface for the general ledger and house accounts. DRB's newest AI work is at the lane: in April 2026 it presented an Autonomous Sales Agent concept for AI-assisted selling at the kiosk.
None of these sorts one member from another. The failed-payment message goes to every member alike, and choosing which members get a personal follow-up is the manager's call. A retail regular gets a plan offer only if somebody builds that segment in Catalyst, and a dashboard shows yesterday's numbers to whoever opens it.
A member whose card failed three times heads the morning worklist
The manager approves update-your-card texts from a morning worklist in Slack: every member with a failed or declined plan payment, sorted by days overdue, with three or more failed attempts flagged for a call.
Before the first car arrives, the partners have each site's wash counts, membership scans and revenue in Slack, set against the same day last week, with any site down more than 15 percent marked and the figures kept in a running sheet.
The marketing manager reviews, each Monday, the retail customers who washed three or more times during the last month without a plan, each with a membership offer drafted in Mailchimp for the plan that fits the wash they buy most, and the five-visit customers marked first.
Early each month the bookkeeper checks a draft QuickBooks invoice for every fleet account, built from last month's washes at that account's contracted rates, with any account that moved sharply from the month before flagged in Slack.
The bookkeeper sends each fleet invoice from QuickBooks
No plan is cancelled, paused or refunded by anything here. WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you, and the Patheon Portal, or SiteWatch's web reports at an older site, is where it finds failed payments, visit histories and fleet usage.
The bookkeeper checks each fleet invoice's totals in QuickBooks before sending it, the marketing manager decides whether the Mailchimp offer goes, and every member text needs the manager's approval. The dunning texts carry a Stripe payment link, so that workflow is for a wash whose plan payments run through Stripe.
Questions people ask
How is the dunning worklist different from Patheon's failed-payment message?
Patheon sends the same message to every member whose plan payment fails. The worklist sorts those members by days overdue, flags anyone at three failed attempts and drafts a personal text for the manager to approve, so the longest-lapsed regulars get a person's attention first.
Will current plan members turn up on the upsell list?
No. The list keeps only customers without an active membership in DRB, so someone who joined this week drops off at the next Monday run.
Can Catalyst send the plan offer instead of Mailchimp?
Yes, if the wash has Catalyst: it segments by visits and membership status and runs drip campaigns by email and text from inside Patheon. The upsell workflow drafts its offer in Mailchimp, for a wash that already sends its marketing from there.
Can one morning digest cover every site?
Yes. It reads every location in the DRB account and posts one site-by-site breakdown, with the top site and any big drop called out.
Sources
- Patheon Car Wash Management Software | DRB Lists the Patheon Portal and POS, wash plan management, Customer Notifications for plan welcomes, failed plan payments, receipts, recharges and expirations, and add-ons including Beacon, LPR and RFID, NoPileups and Catalyst.
- Patheon Customer Loyalty Path | DRB Wash plan management in Patheon: multi-vehicle plans, usage limits, suspending and reactivating plans, and multiple cards stored on file for reactivation.
- Catalyst Car Wash Marketing Automation | DRB Describes Catalyst's segments from visit, purchase and membership data, logic-based automated flows by email and text, and automatic data sync from Patheon.
- SiteWatch Car Wash POS | DRB Covers SiteWatch's Alerts & Bulletins, web reporting, StatWatch, EMV with a Card Account Updater that checks daily for updated cards, and the QuickBooks interface for the general ledger and house accounts.
- SiteWatch Web and StatWatch Reporting | DRB Describes the real-time dashboard with plans sold and lost, the ARM Analysis and member usage reports, and StatWatch's sales, labor, weather and industry comparisons.
- Patheon Reports & Interactive Dashboards | DRB Patheon's Home, Labor, Multi-Site Statistics and Sales Comparison dashboards with car count, sales per car, cars per labor hour and plans sold, updating up to 85 percent faster.
- Press Releases & News | DRB 23 April 2026: DRB presents its Autonomous Sales Agent concept, virtual AI-assisted selling at the car wash lane.
4 ready-made DRB workflows
Each one names the apps it touches and the exact steps it takes. Open one to read what it will do, then turn it on.
Want one of these running on your own DRB?
Show WebRun the process once and it will run it on schedule, in your own private browser environment.