If you’re considering offering service plans or contracts to your customers, great news! Creating a source of recurring income helps stabilise cash flow and boost customer loyalty.
When managing this in ServiceM8, choose an approach that suits your business by considering both your charging method and visit management.
The simplest way to handle this in ServiceM8 is to separate billing frequency from visit frequency.
For example, if customers pay annually but receive monthly visits, you have a billing frequency of once per year and a visit frequency of once per month.
For billing, you could create a single ServiceM8 job that recurs every 12 months. This job manages contract renewal reminders, the annual charge, and contract creation and acceptance.
For visits, you have two options: create a recurring monthly job to track each visit on separate job cards. This would result in 12 visit job cards per year.
– OR –
Use one single ServiceM8 job card that you manually schedule each month to store the information from all 12 visits on 1 job card.
Your choice between these visit management methods depends on whether you want all visit history in one job card or prefer separate completed job cards for each visit.
Do you offer service plans or annual contracts? How do you manage this in ServiceM8 currently?
One Response
Great advice again Hazel, many thanks.
We have used SM8 since 2015 and have used automated reminders to arrive in our inbox as well as messageing the client when their annual service is due. We initially had these set as a recurrence from when the last job completed, but this meant that if the service was delayed, then the continuation of future services would be from the anniversary of the last service rather then the scheduled payment plan. Which only really matters when the service plan is terminated for whatever reason.
I use Xero repeating invoices to manage the payment, so this takes the payment aspect away from the SM8 invoicing, but does allow us to integrate with other Direct Debit providers. Can be a little clunky to initially onboard a new customer, so we have a process to streamline that as best as possible. But once set up, it’s pretty much self managing!