Service agreements

Most service businesses do not live on one-off work. Pest control sells quarterly programs, lawn care sells seasonal schedules, HVAC sells maintenance memberships, janitorial sells monthly contracts. That recurring book is predictable income, and it is the difference between chasing work every January and starting the year already sold.

A service agreement is that relationship, sitting between the client and the jobs it produces.

Set up an agreement

An agreement records who the client is, what is being done, how often, how much, and for how long. From that, everything else follows.

You create one from the client, so it lands against the right record from the start.

Let it produce the visits

From the schedule, the agreement produces visits — the times work is due. When it is time to do the work, a visit becomes a job.

That job is an ordinary job in every respect. Time, expenses, compliance records, photos, margin, invoicing — all of it behaves exactly as it does on work you booked by hand. Nothing about a recurring visit is a second-class record, which is what makes your reporting mean the same thing across your whole book.

See it from the client’s page

A client on an agreement shows it on their page, along with what it entitles them to and what they have been worth to you over time. So the question “are they on a plan, and what does it cover” is answered where you are already standing when somebody rings.

Why it is worth doing

The recurring book is what makes a service business worth something. It is predictable, it is what a buyer pays a multiple for, and it is visible here as a number rather than a feeling — which is the first step to growing it deliberately.