The Installed Base Is Usually Worth More Than the Original Sale

By reading the serialised unit. When the ticket is raised against a serial number, the system looks up the install date, the warranty term attached to that model and any active contract covering that site or that unit, and returns an entitlement before anyone is dispatched. The engineer sees the answer on the job card and the invoice is raised on the same basis. The point is that the decision is made once, automatically, at logging time. If you leave it to an engineer standing in a plant room, or to an administrator arguing three weeks later, you will write the work off. Unbilled chargeable work is the largest and quietest loss in most service operations.

Yes, and you should insist on it. Plant rooms, basements, lift shafts and rural sites do not have reliable signal, and a mobile job record that needs a connection to open is useless in exactly the places engineers work. The app should hold the day's jobs, the unit history and the documentation locally, accept parts, time, photos and a customer signature offline, then sync when the device gets a connection. Speed matters as much as offline capability. If the app takes twenty seconds to load a job, engineers will go back to paper and you will lose the data that everything else on this page depends on.

Each van is set up as a stock location in its own right, replenished from the main store like any other bin. When an engineer books a part to a job, stock moves out of that van at the correct valuation, the part is recorded against the serial number in the unit history, and it appears on the invoice line if the job is chargeable. Van stock also gets counted. A quarterly count per vehicle is not bureaucracy, it is the only thing standing between you and a slow leak of spares that never shows up as a loss anywhere visible.

A contract holds coverage terms, response and fix time commitments, what is included and excluded, the schedule of preventive visits and a renewal date. Pricing should start from the expected cost to serve, which means the preventive visits, the expected reactive calls for that equipment type and age, travel to that site, and parts you have agreed to cover. The failure we see most often is a contract priced once at sale and rolled forward for six years while the equipment ages and the visits get longer. Report margin per contract, review it before every renewal, and be willing to reprice or decline.

Different job entirely. An internal helpdesk supports your own staff on your own systems and is a cost centre. Service management looks outward at equipment you sold to customers, so it carries a commercial layer that a helpdesk has no need for: an installed base of serialised units, warranty terms, contracts with financial consequences for missing an SLA, chargeable work, parts consumption at valuation and invoices. It is also distinct from plant maintenance, which applies the same field disciplines to your own machines rather than to customer equipment.

The job record is the source document. Labour hours at the applicable rate, parts consumed from van stock, travel and callout are already captured against the job by the engineer, so billing is a review and release rather than a rebuild. Entitlement decides what is charged and what is absorbed under warranty or contract. Do it within days, not weeks. Invoice a customer four weeks after the visit and someone will query the hours, nobody will remember the detail, and you will settle for less than the work was worth.