Customers & their kit

Maintenance Plans

Recurring cover sold as an agreement: an annual boiler service, a quarterly grounds visit, a twice-yearly filter change. Visits get booked, invoices get raised, and the term renews or lapses without anybody remembering to do it.

Plans and agreements are two different things

A plan is the thing you sell: a name, a price, a billing interval, how often a visit happens, and what the visit covers. It lives in your catalogue and you can edit it whenever you like.

An agreement is one customer on that plan. When they sign up, the terms are copied onto the agreement rather than pointed at the plan. That is deliberate: raising your price next spring should apply to new customers, not silently re-bill four hundred existing ones on the next sweep.

The plan catalogue, with price, billing interval, visit frequency and how many customers are on each.

What a plan holds

Field	What it does
Price	What the customer pays each billing period.
Billing interval	Monthly, quarterly or yearly. Drives when invoices are raised.
Visit every N months	Held as an interval, not as visits-per-year: the sweep schedules from the last visit, and 'three per year' does not say when.
Visit summary	What a visit covers, in the customer's words. Becomes the booked job's description.
Term	How long the commitment runs before it renews or lapses, in months.

What happens on its own

A sweep runs regularly and looks for agreements with something due. Each thing it does is claimed before it acts, so a retry, an overlapping run or a clock change cannot book two visits for one date or raise the same quarter's invoice twice.

When	What happens
A visit falls due	A job is created against the agreement's property, described from the visit summary, and the next visit date moves forward.
A billing date falls due	An invoice is raised for the agreed price.
The term nears its end	A renewal notice goes out.
The term ends	It renews for another term if auto-renew is on, and lapses if it is not.

Worth knowing

Next visit and next invoice dates are stored on the agreement rather than worked out from history. They are columns you can read, sort by and correct — not a replay of every visit since the customer signed up.

Selling one with a job

A bundle can include a maintenance plan at a discount, which is how you sell “new boiler, half-price cover”. The plan is not priced into the bundle: the customer is told what the cover costs before they sign, and approving the estimate puts them on it, billing on its own schedule from that day.

Enrolment happens once per estimate, however many times the customer opens the acceptance page. See Services, Bundles & Price Book for building the bundle itself.

Worth knowing

The discount is stored on the agreement as agreed, alongside the price. Changing the bundle's discount later does not reach back into agreements already signed.

Cancelling and lapsing

An agreement is active, cancelled or lapsed. Cancelled is a decision somebody made, with a reason recorded; lapsed is a term that ran out with auto-renew off. Neither is deleted, because last year's visits and invoices still have to make sense.

What this does not do

Deleting a plan from your catalogue does not cancel the agreements on it. They carry their own terms and keep running — the link back to the catalogue entry is simply dropped.