HVAC Equipment Tracking: Managing Customer Units

A good HVAC equipment tracking system will become a necessity as your business grows.

As your HVAC business grows, your customer list will most likely follow suit. When this happens, you’ll need a system to notate your customers’ service and billing addresses, the work performed at an individual job site on previous visits, the pieces of equipment that you serviced, and more. Keeping track of this information will prove helpful for your technicians and vital for your company. 

The ability to keep customer-owned equipment records well-organized not only frees up time, it gives your technicians the ability to better notate and document more detailed information about each piece of equipment. With the advent of new HVAC software, you have the ability to track all sorts of important equipment information. Take a look at the information you can record in the HVAC software Smart Service:

As you can see, Smart Service gives you the ability to log quite a bit about your equipment. You can add the name of the equipment you want to work with, the type, description, quantity, service rate, group, location, and more. With the Smart Service mobile app, your technicians have the ability to drop GPS pins near a piece of equipment. This means that in the future your technicians can proceed directly to a unit when they arrive at a larger job site (such as a school rooftop with dozens of air conditioners).

Beyond simply notating the location, model, and serial numbers listed in the screenshot above, Smart Service provides the ability to take pictures of a specific piece of equipment. Using the Smart Service mobile app, you can attach a picture directly to the equipment record. If necessary you (or anyone else at your company) can go back and review any previous pictures taken for more information. 

To do a good job, your techs need accurate information. Giving your techs data from prior trips, installs, and service calls can greatly speed up the process they have to go through to figure out how they can resolve a customer’s issue. The ability to quickly notate the type of equipment, the name, models/serial numbers, and the ability to add notes into that specific equipment record are all great ways you can utilize Smart Service and other HVAC scheduling software.

When technicians can go out and create a record for a piece of customer-owned equipment, future trips to that job site will go as easily and smoothly as possible. Before visiting such a location, techs can quickly pull up their equipment records and discover everything they need to know about prior issues, allowing them to prepare for whatever they think they may find. 

How can you utilize better equipment tracking to grow your business?  Smart Service and its strong reporting system gives you the ability to run reports based on equipment information. For example, you could create a report that will run on all of your equipment records for their Last Serviced Date and their Next Service date. This will give you a list of equipment/customers that will need their equipment serviced in the future. You can use this information as the basis for sending marketing materials on preventative maintenance, for example.  

This kind of organization helps you and your technicians for future jobs, and it also looks really good to your customer base. The ability to quickly bring up, recall, and research an upcoming job can significantly improve the customer’s trust in your company. When you clearly pay attention to and remember customer needs, they will get the idea that you have their best interests at heart. If you can walk up to a customer and say, “This particular part was broken last time, let’s check that out first,” you can quickly instill trust that your company has everything under control. Good equipment information in a situation like this serves as a great sales tool. 

Collecting equipment information, customer information, job information, notes, and pictures with HVAC software gives you a great set of data in a single, convenient place.