For a window cleaner, a pest control company or an HVAC shop, recurring service scheduling is the business. The monthly storefront, the quarterly office building and the spring and fall tune-up pay the bills in slow months and fill the calendar in busy ones. Yet in many companies the plan for the year still lives in a spreadsheet, and someone has to remember that March is a quarterly month.
Why repeat work slips
Recurring work rarely fails all at once. It fails one visit at a time:
- The person who keeps the spreadsheet is on vacation the week a batch comes due.
- A customer asked to move from monthly to every other month, and the change made it into one tab but not the other.
- Two services at the same building run on different cycles, and the second one gets forgotten.
- A customer who only calls when they need you is nowhere on the list, so their price and hours have to be looked up every time.
None of these are hard problems. They are bookkeeping problems, and bookkeeping is what software should do.
Describe the work once
Whatever tool you use, start by writing down each recurring service as its own record with the same few facts:
- Where. The customer and the exact site. A property manager with six buildings has six sites.
- What. The service and the scope notes the crew needs, such as “exterior only, skip the north side.”
- How often, and when. Monthly, quarterly, three times a year, once a year, specific months, or only when the customer calls.
- How long and how many people. Hours per visit and crew size.
- What it’s worth. A flat price per visit or an hourly rate.
If one building gets exterior windows monthly and interiors three times a year, that is two records, not one with a note. Keeping each service separate is what makes the rest of the plan reliable.
Pick the week, not just the month
Many customers expect you in a particular part of the month: the first week, after rent day, before a monthly board meeting. Recording the week of the month next to the months gives the office a due window instead of a vague target, and it keeps the same customer from drifting from the first week to the last over a year.
Keep on-call customers on file
Some of your best customers never commit to a schedule. They call after a storm, before a sale or when the tenant moves out. Treat them like any other recurring customer: keep the site, the scope, the hours and the price on file so the office can book the visit in a minute when the phone rings.
How Sentra Scheduler does it
In Sentra Scheduler each recurring service is a recurring job on a site. You choose the frequency (monthly, quarterly, three or two times a year, annual, custom months, one time or on call), the months, and optionally week 1, 2, 3 or 4 of the month. Hours per visit, crew size and a flat or hourly price sit on the same job.
From there, recurring service scheduling runs on its own:
- Visits are made for you. Each active job gets one visit for every month it runs, a couple of months ahead, created unscheduled with a due window: the chosen week, or the whole month. A month never gets two visits for the same job.
- They wait in the tray. On the schedule, visits due this week or this month sit in the unscheduled tray with their site and hours, and anything past its window shows as overdue.
- On-call jobs stay quiet. They keep their price and hours on file and only become a visit when the customer calls.
- Changes apply forward. Edit a job and choose this visit or all to come; visits already scheduled or worked are left alone.
Know what the work is worth
Because the frequency and the price live on the job, Sentra Scheduler can multiply them out: visits per year times price per visit is the job’s annual value, and the customer’s total is the sum of its jobs. Quoted work you haven’t sold yet can be kept as a proposed job, counted as pipeline value with no visits until it becomes active. The forecast takes the same numbers twelve months ahead and sets the hours needed against what your crews can work. There is more on that in crew capacity planning.
Moving from a spreadsheet
You don’t have to retype the year. The job spreadsheet import reads the plan you keep today, shows a dry run of what it would create, and only applies it when you say so; an import can be undone. If you are weighing the switch, read moving from a spreadsheet to scheduling software.
A quick checklist
- One record per service per site, never one per customer.
- Months and, where the customer cares, the week of the month.
- Hours, crew size and price on every job, including on-call ones.
- A weekly look at what’s due and what’s overdue, before the week starts.
Get those right and recurring service scheduling stops depending on one person’s memory. The visits show up when they’re due, and the office spends its time placing them, not hunting for them.