HVACBossPro Blog — Maintenance Agreements

Not Due, Due, Overdue: Reading the Pin Colors on Your HVAC Tune-Up Map

A map full of pins is only useful if you can read it at a glance. On the HVACBossPro Waiting List, each pin's color tells you where that maintenance agreement visit stands. Three states, three different decisions.

One Map, Three States

The Waiting List itself, and why it is a map instead of a spreadsheet, is covered in The Waiting List Map: Seeing Every HVAC Tune-Up That Has Come Due. This article is about reading it.

Every recurring visit on the map is in one of three states, based on the plan's minimum days between visits and the date of the last completed visit:

• Not due yet — the minimum days have not passed, but the visit is coming up.
• Due now — the minimum days have passed.
• Overdue — more than a 7-day grace has passed since the visit came due.

Not Due Yet: Your Planning Pins

Not-due pins are easy to ignore, and that is a mistake. They are the visits you can book a little early when it helps.

Say the tune-up van has a route on the north side Thursday with eight due members. Two more members on the same streets come due next week. Pulling them onto Thursday saves a separate trip later and gives the van a fuller day. It also keeps those members anchored to the right season, which matters for two-visit plans that can drift over time.

Use judgment. Booking someone weeks early on a 180-day plan is fine. Booking someone two days after their last visit because they live near a route is not.

Due Now: The Work in Front of You

Due pins are your bread and butter. The plan's days have passed, and the member is waiting for their tune-up. In spring and fall, the map can fill with them quickly.

The approach most offices use is to look for clusters. Pick an area with a good handful of due pins, assign them to the tune-up van for a day, and let auto-route order them Closest First or Furthest First from the shop. Then do the next cluster for the next day. A week of routes can be laid out in one sitting.

Due members get reminders by text and email when their visit is booked, plus on-the-way and arrived texts on the day, so the house is open and the thermostat reachable when the tech gets there.

Overdue: The Members to Worry About

A pin turns overdue when the visit is more than seven days past due. The grace period exists so that a visit due on a Monday does not look like a problem by Wednesday. Once it turns overdue, though, it is a real sign something slipped. How that grace works is covered in The 7-Day Grace: How Overdue Works for HVAC Maintenance Agreement Visits.

Overdue members should go to the front of the line. Common reasons a visit ends up overdue:

• The member was booked, but the tech skipped the visit because nobody was home.
• A busy stretch of repair calls pushed tune-ups off the schedule.
• The member is in an outlying area and kept getting left off routes.
• The office has not looked at the Waiting List in a while.

For the first case, a quick two-way text from the office usually finds a day. For the others, build the next route around the overdue pins first and fill in with due neighbors.

Reading the Whole Map

Step back and the colors tell you how the agreement program is doing overall:

• Mostly not-due pins with a few due ones means you are ahead. Good time to pull visits forward or chase new members.
• Lots of due pins is normal at the start of spring and fall. Book them steadily.
• A growing patch of overdue pins means the tune-up side is losing to the repair side. Time to put a van on tune-ups full-time for a few days.

That last pattern is the one that hurts renewals. Members who wait weeks past due for a visit they paid for start to wonder what they are paying for.

Colors on Every Kind of Plan

The same colors apply whether the plan is 180 days, 365 days or a 90-day commercial PM. A quarterly rooftop visit that slips shows up overdue just like a residential tune-up. Landlord properties each have their own pin, so an overdue rental is easy to spot even when the landlord has dozens of addresses.

Learning to read the map takes about a week of using it. After that, a glance in the morning tells the office where to send the tune-up van. See the full set of tools on the HVAC maintenance agreement software page.