Note
Tracking Your Maintenance Agreement Portfolio
When you close a factory installation, the customer asks: who do we call when something fails? For the first year the warranty covers most failures. After that, or for the annual electrical inspection factories are required to have, the answer is a maintenance agreement. You scope the work, agree on the visit schedule, sign the contract, and move on.
The signing is not the problem. The problem is what happens over the next twelve months, and the twelve months after that, as your site list grows and no one has a complete view of what is active, what has lapsed, and what is coming due.
What Does a Factory Electrical Maintenance Agreement Cover?
The scope varies by system type, but the core items for industrial LED installations typically include:
- Annual lux verification at key measurement points in the facility
- Replacement of failed LED drivers and lamps that fall within warranty scope
- Visual inspection of conduit runs, junction boxes, and panel connections
- A signed inspection report the customer can keep on file
For commercial and industrial solar systems, the scope usually adds:
- Panel cleaning on an agreed schedule (often twice a year in Thailand’s dust and pollen season)
- Inverter inspection: error log review, cooling check, connection torque check
- System performance review comparing actual energy yield against the estimate at commissioning
- Annual electrical inspection report for submission to the relevant authority
Some agreements include an emergency call-out clause; others explicitly exclude it. That clause is the one most likely to get triggered without anyone first checking whether it is actually in scope.
How Many Sites Is Too Many to Track Without a System?
A contractor who closes 15 factory installations over three years, each with a one-year renewable maintenance agreement, has a portfolio that looks manageable in year one and becomes genuinely difficult by year three.
A rough picture of that portfolio in year three:
- Agreements in year one: the customer is still engaged, calls are frequent, nothing has been forgotten
- Agreements in year two or three: visits have probably happened, but “probably” is doing a lot of work
- Two or three agreements where the renewal conversation never happened and the status is unknown
- Several where the annual inspection is due this quarter but has not been scheduled
If each site needs two visits per year, 15 sites produce 30 scheduled visits on top of installation work booked in parallel. That is two to three maintenance visits every month, year-round. Getting those visits staffed in the right month is not a memory problem. It is a scheduling problem, and it compounds with every new job closed.
What Falls Through When There Is No Portfolio Tracking
Lapsed agreements. A contract expires and the renewal conversation never happens. The customer assumes coverage continues; the contractor assumes the customer will call if they want to renew. Both wait. The next service call gets invoiced at a rate the customer was not expecting, or not invoiced at all because nobody checked the agreement status before dispatching the technician.
Unserved sites. The annual visit is written into the contract but it is not in anyone’s calendar. At the end of the year the customer asks for the inspection report. The contractor has to schedule an emergency visit that disrupts the following month’s installation bookings and produces a report dated awkwardly late.
Out-of-scope service. Without a clear record of which sites have call-out coverage and which do not, a technician gets dispatched on a call that was never in the agreement. The customer does not pay. The cost falls to the contractor. This repeats wherever scope is not checked before the truck leaves.
Four Fields Every Active Agreement Needs in the Record
Each active maintenance agreement is, operationally, a site with four attached pieces of information:
1. Agreement start and end date. Without this, you cannot know what is active, what has lapsed, and what is coming up for renewal in the next ninety days. The renewal window matters as much as the expiry date: most contractors need sixty to ninety days to schedule a final inspection report, negotiate any scope changes, and get a signature on the renewal.
2. Agreed scope in plain language. Listed in enough detail that whoever takes the service call can confirm whether a specific request is covered before dispatching. “Emergency call-out included” or “scheduled visits only” takes ten words to write and avoids a significant dispute later.
3. Scheduled visit dates. Both visits (or four, or six) written as actual calendar dates linked to the technician schedule, not as a “Q2 and Q4” note in a contract folder. An unscheduled visit does not happen until the customer chases it.
4. Inspection report status. Whether the report for each visit this contract year has been completed, signed, and sent to the customer. A completed visit with no report is incomplete: the customer has no documentation, the contractor has no proof, and the record shows nothing happened.
A site register carrying these four fields for every closed installation is what makes a portfolio of twenty agreements readable by one person on one screen. It is the same record that already holds the completion date and the warranty expiry for each site.
Does the Portfolio Have to Grow Before This Matters?
Not really. The contractors who set this up before they have ten active agreements are the ones who can scale without the portfolio becoming a source of missed revenue and complaints. Those who wait build the record while chasing overdue visits and a renewal conversation that should have happened last month.
The agreements are the downstream output of every job you close. Getting the terms into the site record at signing is the only point at which it costs nothing.
FAQ
What is the difference between a warranty period and a maintenance agreement?
The warranty period covers defects in materials and workmanship for a fixed term (usually one to two years) and is included in the installation contract. A maintenance agreement is a separate, paid service covering scheduled inspections, agreed upkeep, and optionally emergency response. Which sites are still inside that warranty term is a separate question, and one worth being able to answer on the phone. Some contractors include a first-year agreement in the installation package; others sell it separately after handover.
What happens when a technician is dispatched to a site with an expired agreement?
The common outcome is work done at an unagreed rate, or not invoiced at all, because nobody checked the agreement status before confirming the call. The fix is one step in the dispatch process: check agreement status before confirming any service request. If it has expired, that conversation happens before the truck leaves.
Can a portfolio of twenty agreements be managed in a spreadsheet?
Yes, for a while. A spreadsheet holds the four fields. What it does not do: raise a job order when a visit date arrives, link the scheduled visit to the technician calendar, or flag renewals automatically. Those are manual steps that get missed when the installation schedule is busy.
If you want to see how TRACE 30 handles active maintenance agreements alongside installation scheduling, the overview is at /program/. If you want to talk through what a portfolio view would look like for your site list, the call details are at /schedule-a-call/.