Maintenance Work

Is This Covered, or Do We Bill It?

By Travis Evans, Founder of TradeGOAT · 20+ years in the trades

A technician calls the office in the middle of the afternoon. He is standing at a unit he got sent to on a trouble call, he has the problem fixed, and he needs one thing before he can write his ticket. Is this covered, or do we bill it?

Whoever picks up the phone either knows or does not. In most shops it is one person who knows, and if that person is at lunch the answer is a guess. Somebody goes looking for an agreement that was signed three years ago, finds the PDF, and reads a paragraph written by an office that no longer works there.

I came up in the elevator trade, but this is the same phone call in HVAC, refrigeration, fire and life safety, generators, overhead doors, and anywhere else that sells a maintenance agreement. The agreement is the whole business model, and the terms of it live in a filing cabinet instead of in the hands of the man doing the work.

Both ways you can be wrong cost you

If you bill for something the agreement covered, the invoice comes back. The customer is annoyed, somebody in your office spends an hour straightening it out, and the thing that customer remembers about you that month is your paperwork. That one you find out about.

If you eat something you should have billed, nobody finds out about it at all. You did work you had every right to charge for, it never became a line on an invoice, and it does not show up anywhere as a loss. It just quietly is one. Over a year of trouble calls, that is the more expensive mistake by a wide margin, and it is the one no report will ever hand you.

An agreement covers equipment, not a customer

Most software treats a maintenance agreement as a checkbox on the customer. Under contract, yes or no. I have never signed an agreement that read that way.

A building has four units and you cover three of them. The fourth got added two years after the fact and sits on its own terms, or on nothing. A property manager hands you eight buildings and six of them are on the agreement. If your tool only knows that the customer is under contract, it is going to be wrong about a specific machine on a specific afternoon, which is the only time anybody actually asks.

So in TradeGOAT, an agreement covers the equipment you name on it. A unit sits on one live agreement at a time. When a unit comes off, that gets a date rather than disappearing, so a ticket you wrote two years ago can still tell you what was covering that machine when you wrote it.

You say the terms once, in plain words

Setting one up is four steps, and the questions are the ones you would answer out loud if I called and asked you what the deal was.

Parts. You say whether parts are covered, and one of your answers is that some of them are. When you pick that one, you type the list, and you can type it whichever way your agreement is actually written. If the paper says these parts are covered, you list those. If it says these parts get billed, you list those instead. You should not have to invert your own agreement in your head to get it into a piece of software.

Repair labor and mileage. Same three answers, asked plainly.

Trouble calls, in three time bands. A call at ten in the morning and a call at two in the morning are not the same money, and almost no agreement pretends they are. So you answer for regular hours, after hours, and the overnight and holiday band separately.

Anything else their agreement says. There is a box for it, in your own words. I put that there because no set of fields I can design will hold a real agreement. Every one I have ever signed had a line in it that no software would have had a place for, and that line is usually the one that comes up in an argument.

Then the ticket already knows

When a tech opens a ticket on a covered unit, the coverage is a sentence on the ticket in plain language, rather than a badge or a code he has to interpret. When there is no agreement on that unit, the ticket shows nothing at all about coverage, because an empty field is its own kind of wrong answer.

There is one question it will ask him, and only when the answer actually changes something. If the unit is covered, the visit is a service call or a repair, and your three time bands do not all say the same thing, it asks when the customer called you out. That is a fact he knows and can answer in a second. It is not asking him to make a call on policy, which is not his job and never was.

The office can see why a number is small

The other half of this shows up on the needs-billing list, where somebody in the office is turning finished work into invoices.

Covered mileage says covered and stays out of the total. Covered labor says how many hours and that they were covered. So when a row comes through smaller than the office expected, the reason is written on it. Nobody has to call the tech back to find out whether he forgot to put his hours in.

How often you bill, and what your invoice actually says

Setup asks how often you bill for the agreement and then asks you to type the number that appears on your own invoice.

That sounds like a small thing and it is not. Plenty of agreements bill quarterly. If a tool asks a man with a fourteen-hundred-and-forty-dollar quarterly agreement for a monthly amount, he either divides in his head or types his quarterly number into a monthly box, and from then on everything downstream is off by a factor of three. As you type, the annual total shows on screen, so you can see your own number and know you put it in the right place.

The visits come off the agreement too

The last step asks how often you go out and whether to put the covered equipment on that schedule. Say yes and the covered units get their clock, and step four shows you the promise you just made in one line: four pieces of equipment, every three months, four visits a year.

The reason that matters is what used to happen without it. An operator would finish setting up an agreement, feel good about it, go look at his maintenance list, and find it empty, because telling the tool about an agreement and telling the tool when to go out were two unrelated chores and nobody ever did the second one. Now the schedule comes from the agreement, which is where it came from in real life all along. Equipment that is already on a schedule keeps the schedule it has.

Renewal

The agreement carries its dates and reminds you before the term is up, and rolling it forward is one tap. When the amount changes, the new amount is on the screen you are looking at when you make that decision.

Where this fits with the rest of the work

This is the piece that sits underneath the service ticket your tech fills out at the unit and the record each machine keeps about itself. The ticket is this visit. The machine's log is what is true about that machine over the years. The agreement is what you promised the customer about it, and until now that was the one part of the story that was not in the tool with the other two.

Put together, a tech shows up at a unit, the ticket knows what is covered on that machine, he does the work, he adds a line to the log for the next man, and the repair he found while he was there turns into work you actually get paid for.

Straight about where this stands

Coverage and terms are live in the tool right now. You can set up an agreement on a customer, name the equipment it covers, put your terms in, get the schedule out of it, and have it read back to you on the ticket and on the unit.

Two more pieces are drawn up and coming, and I would rather name them than let you assume they are here. The first is the money side: what your maintenance agreements are actually making you, as recurring revenue you can look at. The second is maintenance tickets that build themselves off the schedule instead of somebody creating them. That order is on purpose, because both of them depend on the tool knowing what is covered and on what terms, and that is the part that had to be right first.