Service agreements — cadence, visits, invoicing

Maintenance work has a different physics than project work: the money is smaller, the count is higher, and the whole business is remembering — whose quarter is due, what was promised, what hasn't been billed. A service agreement in STrOp is that memory: one record that says what you maintain, how often you show up, and how often you bill, with the calls and invoices flowing from it instead of from someone's calendar.

Set one up

1. Service → Agreements (/service/agreements) → new agreement.
2. Anchor it to the customer and site (Customers & Sites is the service module's own directory — a school district with nine campuses is one customer, nine sites).
3. Set the two cadences — they're separate on purpose:
   • Service cadence — how often you visit: monthly, quarterly, semiannual, or annual.
   • Billing cadence — how often you invoice, which doesn't have to match (quarterly visits billed annually in advance is a normal shape).
4. Scope, dates, and the prevailing wage flag. Public-agency maintenance — school gyms, city facilities — is routinely prevailing-wage work: flag it here so the visits' timecards and payroll reporting carry the obligation from day one.

Live with it

• Visits become service calls on the agreement's cadence — they show up to be dispatched like any other call, and completing one stamps the agreement's last-visit date, so "when were we last out there?" is a field, not an archaeology project.
• Invoices follow the billing cadence in Service → Invoices — agreement work bills from the agreement, not from a from-scratch invoice each cycle.
• Follow-ups capture the upsell. What a tech finds on a maintenance visit — the recoat, the repair, the replacement — lands in Follow-ups instead of dying in a truck cab. That list is where agreement customers become project customers again.

Common mistakes

• Running maintenance as tiny projects. A project wants an estimate, an SOV, a closeout. A quarterly PM visit wants none of that — the agreement is the right-sized container, and it's the difference between recurring revenue and recurring admin.
• One agreement for nine sites. Anchor per site where the work is per-site — visit history, assets, and dispatch all read cleaner when the site is on the agreement.
• Missing the prevailing-wage flag on public customers. The wage obligation doesn't care that it's "just maintenance." Flag it at setup, not at the first audit letter.

See also

• Dispatch board basics
• Certified payroll — weekly cadence and DIR submission
• Warranty callback or workmanship? The lessons-learned loop