Plumbing businesses are organised around the calls that cannot wait, which is reasonable, and it means the planned half of the business is usually the half nobody has costed. Service agreements, annual checks, booked installations: known work, known hours, agreed prices. It is the predictable part of the year and it is where margin is most often given away by accident.
What a programme of planned visits costs
On the worked example this site publishes, 240 customers on an agreement at 2 visits a year is 480 visits. At 1.3 hours each and a loaded technician cost of $58 an hour, that is 624 hours and $36,192. Charged at $145 a visit it invoices $69,600 and leaves $33,408, before anything is said about the repair work the visits find.
Planned work competes with emergencies for the same people
Those 624 hours come out of the same capacity as the calls that cannot wait, which is the collision most schedules hide. A planned visit that is invisible on the day board is a planned visit that slips, and a programme that slips for three months is a programme customers stop renewing.
Price the visit, not the year
Selling an agreement for a round annual figure without dividing it by the visits and the hours is how thin margin gets agreed. The worksheet on this site does that division in one screen, and finding out that the number is negative is unpleasant and considerably cheaper than finding out in the spring.
The agreement is a contract with a schedule attached
Notice periods, minimum terms and renewal all live in the agreement, and where it was signed at the customer home the Federal Trade Commission cooling off rule can apply to qualifying sales. The board is where that agreement turns into visits, so the terms and the schedule should agree with each other rather than living in different systems.
Questions people ask about plumbing service scheduling software
Should planned visits be scheduled a year ahead?
Put them on the board in the month they are due rather than the day, then let the dispatcher place them. A year of fixed dates is a year of rescheduling.
What if the agreement work is loss making?
It may still be worth doing if it reliably finds repair work, but that argument should be made deliberately with the number in front of you rather than by accident.
Does the worksheet include the repair work it finds?
No, on purpose. Keep that argument separate so you can see what you are subsidising and by how much.