Field services

Service agreements and maintenance plans · the revenue that repeats

Two gears of this vertical handle recurring work: the service agreements on the Commercial tab, with response time, a not-to-exceed amount per job, a purchase order requirement, an approval threshold and periodic preventive inspections; and maintenance plans, which generate the period's visits, renew on their own or expire, and show up for the customer in the portal.

A customer who calls when something breaks is worth one visit. A customer under contract is worth a calendar. The two pieces in this article exist to turn one-off calls into predictable revenue, and to stop a technician from authorizing on site what the contract says must be approved first.

Service agreements: the B2B contract becomes a rule

Open Field Services and go to the Commercial tab. The New agreement block creates the agreement with four parameters that are usually written in the contract and living only in somebody's head: Agreement name, SLA response (hours), NTE per job, which is the not-to-exceed amount for a single work order, and Approval threshold. There is also the PO required checkbox, for the customer who only pays against a purchase order.

On the Commercial tab, fill in Agreement name.
Enter SLA response (hours), for example 4.
Enter NTE per job, the highest amount a work order can reach without breaking the contract.
Enter the Approval threshold, above which a job starts requiring approval.
Check PO required if the customer demands a purchase order.
Click Create agreement. It starts Active, and can later be moved to Expired.

Evaluating a job against the agreement

The Evaluate a job block exists to answer beforehand rather than afterwards. Enter the Job amount, check Has PO if there is a purchase order, and the system answers Allowed, Blocked or Needs approval, along with the time the SLA is due. When it blocks, it says why: Over the not-to-exceed (NTE) or PO required but missing.

Example: The Mercado Sul chain has an agreement with a 4-hour response, a not-to-exceed of R$ 3,000.00 per job, an approval threshold of R$ 1,500.00 and a mandatory purchase order. A R$ 2,200.00 call comes in with no purchase order. The evaluation returns Blocked, with the reason PO required but missing. Once the purchase order is in hand, the same evaluation returns Needs approval, because the amount is over the threshold but within the not-to-exceed. The coordinator sorts the paperwork out at their desk, instead of with a technician standing idle in the store.

Recurring inspections

Still on the Commercial tab, the Recurring inspections (PM) block sets up the agreement's preventive routine. Enter the Inspection name and how often it runs in months in the Every field, then click Add. Each inspection shows in the list marked Due or Upcoming, and the Mark done button records the run and recalculates the next due date.

Multi-site billing rollup

The Multi-site billing rollup block settles the monthly conversation with the customer who has many locations. Pick the customer and the screen shows, site by site, the amount Billed, the amount Paid and the amount Outstanding. It is the number that replaces the spreadsheet somebody rebuilt by hand every time the chain asked for a close.

Maintenance plans

A maintenance plan is the subscription version of your service. A plan sets the name, monthly or annual billing, the price, the currency, how many visits it includes per year, the frequency, the priority level the subscriber gets in the queue, the member discount, the benefits in writing and the trade it applies to. A customer's membership is created from a plan and can be tied to a specific property.

The period's visits are generated automatically according to the plan, and each one can be marked done, tied to the service that fulfilled it.
A membership can be paused, resumed and cancelled.
At renewal, a membership set to auto-renew rolls one billing cycle forward; one that is not becomes Expired.
A one-off service that has already been performed can be converted into a plan membership, which is the natural conversation after an expensive repair.
Every membership carries a profitability reading, so you know whether the plan is covering the cost of the visits it promises.

Plans show up for the customer themselves in the Maintenance plans section of the portal, with the start date and the next renewal, and with the status Active, Paused, Expired or Cancelled.

💡 Maintenance plans are operated through the integration features and the system terminal, not through a tab of their own on the Field Services screen. What they produce is visible in the operation and in the customer portal.

Limits and permissions

Everything here depends on the Field Services vertical being enabled in Settings, Verticals.
Evaluating a job against the agreement is a check you trigger; it informs and explains, and the reason for a block stays visible to whoever has to decide.
An agreement moved to Expired stops counting as a reference for new evaluations.
Automatic visit generation and plan renewal run on a periodic routine, not the instant you click.
Cancelling a membership does not erase the history of the visits it already delivered.

Frequently asked questions

Does the agreement stop the technician from working? It does not tie the technician's hands on site, but it answers beforehand, with Allowed, Blocked or Needs approval and the reason, so the decision leaves the street and goes back to the coordinator.
Can one customer have both an agreement and a plan? Yes. The agreement governs the commercial terms of the work orders; the plan governs the cadence of the visits.
I marked an inspection done ahead of time. The next due date is recalculated from that record, so you only need to steer the routine back on the next cycle.
What happens if auto-renewal is off? The membership turns Expired on the date, with no new charge and no new visits.
The billing rollup is empty. That is because the customer has no invoices issued at their sites yet.

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