Maintenance agreement scheduling is the planning and booking of recurring visits owed to customers under a service plan or membership, such as twice-yearly HVAC tune-ups or quarterly pest treatments.
How to measure it
The key number is whether you deliver the visits you sold:
Visit completion rate = Agreement visits completed in their due period ÷ Agreement visits due in that period × 100
Say you have 600 agreements with two visits a year, so 1,200 visits are due. If 1,050 were completed in their due season, the completion rate is 87.5%. The other 150 are promised work you have been paid for, or may be asked to refund.
A second number is useful for planning:
Agreement load = Visits due per week × Average visit duration
That tells you how many hours of the week's capacity the agreements will take.
Why it matters for scheduling
Agreement visits are the most flexible work most companies have. The customer usually needs the visit within a season, not on a specific day. That makes them ideal filler.
Used well, they raise schedule density. Book agreement visits near jobs already on a truck's day, or into gaps left by cancellations, and they add work with little extra driving. Used badly, they get pushed back during busy weeks until the season ends with a pile of overdue visits that all need booking at once.
In seasonal trades such as HVAC, the timing matters even more. Spring and fall tune-ups fall in the shoulder seasons before the peaks. Getting them done then frees capacity for the rush. The HVAC technician scheduling guide covers how this fits into a seasonal plan.
A common mistake
Booking agreement visits by the calendar alone. Sending every customer a reminder in March and taking whatever day they choose spreads the visits across the territory at random. Offering times when a truck will already be nearby keeps the drive down. That is the same principle as travel-feasible scheduling, applied to work that is flexible enough to benefit from it most.
Related terms
- Schedule density rises when agreement visits fill gaps near existing work.
- Capacity planning needs agreement load as an input.
- Travel-feasible scheduling is how to place flexible visits without adding driving.
Common questions
When should maintenance agreement visits be scheduled?
Ahead of the trade's peak season, in the slower shoulder periods. That gets them done before demand spikes.
Should agreement customers get priority scheduling?
Some plans promise it. If yours does, keep some capacity aside for agreement customers during peak periods so the promise holds.
How do I avoid a backlog of overdue visits?
Track completion rate weekly through the season, not at the end. Fill gaps with agreement work as soon as they appear.