Set up a service agreement — cadence, visits, dispatch, invoice

Meridian wants every building walked and patched every three months. Fine. Patch-and-paint on a property manager's portfolio isn't a project; it's a promise on a calendar, and the money only shows up if someone remembers the calendar. In STrOp the promise is a service agreement: a customer, a scope, and a cadence. The agreement knows when the next visit is due, the visit goes on the dispatch board, and the finished visit becomes the invoice.

Write the agreement

1. Service in the sidebar (/service). The top row is the service side of the shop at a glance — active agreements, customers, sites, Visits Due (30d). Below it, Service Agreements.
2. + New Agreement. Customer is a CRM company (Meridian Property Group; add it under Companies first if it isn't there), then the Site, a Title ("Quarterly patch-and-paint"), and the two cadences: Service Cadence (Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-annual, Annual) and Billing Cadence. They're separate on purpose — quarterly visits billed annually is a normal shape.
3. Start Date, End Date, Scope, and the visit template. Each spawned visit starts from that text, so write it the way you'd brief a tech. Create Agreement. It gets a number: SA-001.

Let it spawn the visits

1. Open SA-001. The header shows Next Visit Due, worked out from the cadence and the last visit. Nobody puts the next date on a calendar by hand.
2. + Spawn Visit creates the service call for that date. It shows in the agreement's visit list — call number, title, target date, sign-off, dispatch — and on the dispatch board at the same moment.

Dispatch it, do it, bill it

1. Service → Dispatch (/service/dispatch). Week or Day view; drill into the day to edit. On the card: the Dispatch status (Scheduled, Dispatched, En Route, On Site, Complete), the Date, and Techs — + add tech… and pick Okafor. Monday morning, touch-up kit.
2. Okafor opens the call under My Calls, moves the status as he goes, and finishes with Customer Sign-off → Complete Call. Name and signature on the visit, not a text message.
3. Service → Invoices → + Invoice a Completed Call. Pick the Completed Call, set the Flat Visit Fee, Create Invoice. Add time and material lines in the editor if the visit turned up extra work. The call flips to Invoiced. Recurring revenue that nobody has to chase.

What Okafor finds while he's there — the stair wall that isn't patch-and-paint — goes in Follow-ups. That list is where agreement customers become project customers again.

Common mistakes

• Running the quarterly as a tiny project. A project wants an estimate, an SOV, a closeout. A visit wants a date, a tech, and a signature. Use the agreement.
• One agreement for the whole portfolio. Meridian has nine buildings; the visit history and the dispatch card read cleaner when the site is on the agreement.
• Invoicing from memory. Bill from the completed call. If the call isn't complete with a sign-off, there's nothing to invoice yet, and that's correct.

See also

• E19 · The callback
• E21 · The call
• Service agreements — cadence, visits, invoicing
• Dispatch board basics