How We Handle HVAC Maintenance Plan Money Each Month

Lots of HVAC owners sell maintenance plans. A customer pays once, and your techs come out twice a year to check the furnace and the AC. It's steady money, and customers like it.

It can also quietly scramble your books if nobody's watching. Here's what we do behind the scenes each month to keep that from happening. The company below is a composite, and there's a note about that at the end.

The setup

Picture a small HVAC shop with a handful of techs and an owner who still runs calls. They sell a lot of plans in the fall, right when the first cold snap hits the Gallatin Valley and everyone remembers their furnace.

The plan money lands in the bank in one big wave. The tune-up visits happen over the next year.

So the owner looks at October and sees a great month. Then spring comes. The crew is out doing all those prepaid visits, and the books show a lot of work with very little new money. The owner starts to wonder what went wrong.

Nothing went wrong. The books were just telling the story in the wrong order.

What we do each month

Our monthly close for an HVAC company follows the same steps every time. A few of them only matter for this kind of business.

We match every deposit to its source

A deposit might be a repair, a new system, or a plan. Each one goes in its own spot. If plan money gets mixed in with repair money, you can't tell which side of the business is growing.

We count plan money as work you still owe

When a customer prepays for a year of visits, we don't count it all as earned on day one. We spread it out as the techs actually do the visits. That way each month shows the money that matches the work.

This is the part most owners never see. It's also the part that keeps October from looking amazing and April from looking scary. It works best on accrual books, and that choice deserves some thought. We wrote about choosing cash or accrual books for a seasonal business if you want the longer version.

We check the parts on the trucks

Techs grab parts from the supply house all day. Some go right into a job. Some ride around on the truck for weeks. We match supply house bills to jobs, so you can see what each job really cost, not just what you charged.

We set aside deposits on new systems

A customer puts money down on a new furnace, but the install is a few weeks out. We hold that deposit aside until the job is done. Otherwise it looks like money you've earned, and you haven't yet.

What the owner gets

At the end of the close, the owner gets a short report and plain answers to 3 questions. Did we make money last month? Which kind of work made it? How much plan work do we still owe customers?

That last one matters more than people think. If you sold a big batch of plans, some of that cash is probably already spent. The visits still have to happen, and your techs still have to get paid for them.

Once the owner can see that, planning gets easier. They know spring will be busy but light on new cash, so it stops being a surprise. The guessing stops too.

Why we do it this way

None of this is fancy. It's the same few steps, done every month, busy or slow. The part of running an HVAC business nobody warns you about is usually the books, and most of the mess comes from small things that never got done on a schedule.

We also keep bookkeeping and tax prep under one roof. So when it's time to file, the person looking at your return already knows how your plan money works. You don't have to explain it twice.

About this story

This is a composite. It's built from patterns we see across HVAC and other trade businesses, not one specific client. The company, the people, and the details are illustrative.

If this sounds like your shop

If you sell maintenance plans and your months swing in ways that don't make sense, let's talk it through. Take a look at our monthly bookkeeping for Bozeman service businesses, or call 406-404-8955. You'll hear back within one business day.