ElectricalBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

Recurring Commercial Lighting Maintenance on a 14- or 30-Day Schedule

A burned-out light in a parking lot, a dark aisle in a store, a flickering fixture over the gym floor. Commercial customers notice these, and so do their customers. Many businesses would rather pay an electrical company to walk the property on a regular schedule than wait for complaints. For the electrical company, that kind of account is steady recurring work that fills the calendar every couple of weeks or every month.

Off Paper, Onto the Cycle

The previous guide, Moving an Electrical Company Off the Whiteboard and the Paper Schedule, suggested setting up recurring work early in the switch. Commercial lighting maintenance is one of the best reasons to do it, because a short cycle is very hard to track by hand.

Setting the Cycle

In ElectricalBossPro, recurring work is set by minimum days between visits. For commercial lighting maintenance or relamping, common choices are:

• Every 14 days for properties where lighting is critical, like a busy retail lot or a gym open long hours.
• Every 30 days for offices and smaller stores where a monthly walk-through is enough.

Each location gets its own recurring service. The cycle counts from the last completed visit, so if one visit is a few days late, the next one shifts with it instead of piling up.

One Client, Every Location

A retail chain or a gym with several locations is one client with many addresses. Each address keeps its own equipment saved on the property, access notes and job history. A fixture type, a lift requirement or a note about where the lighting panel is located stays with that address, and the tech sees it every visit.

Measurements on each property help too. The number of fixtures can be recorded on the address, and services can be priced off it.

The Waiting List Does the Remembering

When each location comes due, it appears on the Waiting List map, colored due now. If it goes past the 7-day grace without being scheduled, it turns overdue. For a short cycle, that matters: a 14-day account missed for two weeks is a customer noticing that nobody came.

The map also makes grouping easy. Locations in the same area that come due together can go on one van and one day. For how to read those colors, see Not Due, Due Now, Overdue: Reading the Pin Colors on the Electrician's Waiting List.

After-Hours Runs

Lighting work at a business often has to happen before opening or after closing. A good pattern is a dedicated run:

• Pick the due locations for that week from the Waiting List.
• Assign them to one van on one day.
• Set the route order by hand around each location's hours, and note the hours on each job.

The access notes on each address tell the tech which door to use and who to call. The right contact at each location gets the on-the-way and arrived texts. For the details of after-hours work, see Scheduling Commercial Electrical Work After Hours: Retail, Gyms and Offices.

When a Visit Has to Move

Short cycles leave less room for slips, but they still happen. A store asks to skip a week for a holiday sale, or a storm day takes the van. Move the visit to another day on the board and text the contact at that location. The visit stays due until it is completed, so the cycle picks up from whenever the tech actually does the work, and the location cannot quietly drop off the schedule.

What the Tech Records

On each visit, the tech can note what was replaced or found and take before-and-after photos in the app. Those stay with the job. If the tech finds something beyond routine maintenance, the office can build an estimate from your service list and send it to the client for online approval. The approved estimate becomes a scheduled job.

Billing a Recurring Commercial Account

A commercial client set to Monthly gets one statement each month covering every address, with each line labeled with the address. For a 14-day account, that means two visits per location on one statement. For a chain with ten locations, it means one statement instead of twenty invoices. The client's accounts person sees the whole month at once.

A card on file can be charged on a schedule, or the client can pay from the customer app. Past-due follow-up handles the occasional slow payer.

Steady Work, If You Keep the Cycle

Commercial lighting maintenance is the kind of work that keeps vans busy between installs and service calls. It only stays profitable if every visit happens on time. To see how recurring commercial work fits with the dispatch board and the Waiting List, visit the ElectricalBossPro electrician scheduling software page.