Automating maintenance contracts: what does it earn you?

Automating maintenance contracts is not about scheduling. It is about revenue you already sold but never collected. You have customers who get a service visit every year or every two years. They pay for it, or you agreed to it. And still, part of it slips through every year: the visit nobody scheduled, the contract that quietly expired, the extra work that made it onto the job sheet but not onto the invoice. That is not new revenue you still have to win. That is revenue you already had.

This article covers exactly what leaks away, how to check it against your own numbers, what you should and should not automate, and which three rules you cannot ignore along the way. No software comparison, you can find those everywhere. Just the calculation most vendors skip.

Where the revenue from your maintenance contracts leaks away

In almost every service business we talk to, the contract administration lives in two places: a spreadsheet, and the head of whoever does the planning. As long as that person is around, it works well enough. But well enough is exactly where the leak sits. There are four places it goes wrong, and all four feel like something small.

• The visit that never gets scheduled. The contract is running, the customer is paying, but this year's visit is nowhere on the calendar. You only remember when the customer calls you.
• The visit that happened but was not fully invoiced. The engineer replaces a part that falls outside the contract. It is on the job sheet. It is not on the invoice, because nobody had time to pull up the contract.
• The contract that quietly expires. No cancellation, no argument, just an end date nobody saw coming. The customer finds out when the boiler breaks down.
• The customer who leaves because you were not proactive. They pay for maintenance every year and still have to chase you for it. Next time, they call someone else.

All four are small per case. All four are large per year. And all four are administration, not craftsmanship. Exactly the kind of work you do not want to hand to an engineer, and do not want to hire an extra planner for either.

Do the maths with your own numbers

Before you talk to anyone about automating, you want to know what you are talking about. You need two numbers, and both are already in your own system: how many contracts are running, and what an average contract is worth per year.

You do not have to guess what a service visit is worth. Feenstra, the largest player in the Netherlands, publishes it on its own site: a one-off maintenance visit without a subscription costs 187 euros. Take out a subscription and you pay 75 euros for the first combined inspection and service visit, then between 8.45 and 19.99 euros per month depending on what is included. The maintenance itself happens every two years.

Translated to your situation: a running contract is easily worth one hundred to two hundred and fifty euros a year in recurring revenue, and a standalone visit sits around two hundred. Now the calculation. Say you have 400 running contracts worth an average of 150 euros a year. That is 60,000 euros in recurring revenue. If 8 percent of that skips a year, because the visit was never planned or the contract quietly ran out, you are looking at 4,800 euros. That is a month's salary, gone, without anyone making a mistake.

That 8 percent is an assumption, not a measurement. We do not know your percentage and you probably do not either. That is precisely the point. The first gain from automating is not that the leak closes. The first gain is that you can finally see it.

What you can genuinely automate around maintenance contracts

Five things that simply work today, in the order of how quickly they pay for themselves.

1. The visit appears on the planning by itself

Per object you record when the next visit is due: per boiler, per air conditioning unit, per installation, per machine. The system prepares it well before the due date, as a task or a draft job sheet. Nobody has to work through a list any more. The difference with a reminder in your calendar is that this one moves with you: postpone a visit and the next one shifts along automatically.

2. The customer picks their own slot

Instead of calling until you reach someone, you send an invitation in which the customer picks one of the slots you made available. That does not just save phone minutes. Above all it saves the double work of no answer, call back later, still no answer. If you plan by postcode, the chosen slots also make your route more efficient.

3. The reminder that prevents the closed door

A message the day before is the cheapest automation there is, and immediately the most underrated. An engineer standing at a closed door costs you the hour, the drive and the rescheduled appointment. Work out yourself what one avoided wasted trip is worth against the cost of a message. This is almost always the first thing we build, simply because it pays back fastest.

4. The extra work that ends up on the invoice

This is the hardest and immediately the most valuable. A system puts the job sheet description and the materials used next to the contract terms and gives one of three answers: covered, not covered, or unclear. That third answer is the most important of the three. A system that is never unsure is a system you should not trust.

5. The renewal you see coming

Three months before the end date you know which contracts are expiring, what they are worth and when your customer last heard from you. Not to renew automatically, because often you are not allowed to, more on that below. But to have a conversation in time instead of losing a customer after the fact.

What you are better off not automating

We do not sell AI for the sake of AI. Leave these things alone, even if a vendor tells you it is possible.

• The judgement of whether something is safe. A system may flag that an appliance has gone three years without a service. It may never conclude that this is fine.
• The conversation with a customer who wants to cancel. That is exactly the moment you want to be a human, not a message.
• The complaint after a visit that went wrong. Automate the alert, not the answer.
• The price increase on a running contract. You write that yourself, in your own words, and you call your ten biggest customers.
• Anything whose result you cannot check. If you cannot verify afterwards that it was right, it should not happen by itself.

Three rules you cannot get around

Your customer is allowed to leave, and you may not lock that down

For private customers, Dutch law (the Wet Van Dam) applies. A contract with a consumer runs for a maximum of one year, and after a silent renewal the customer may cancel every month with a notice period of no more than one month. So automatically renewing for another full year is not allowed, however tempting it is to build that in. What is allowed and works better: seeing in time that a contract is ending and doing something about it yourself. The big players work the same way. Feenstra states on its own site that after the minimum term of one year you can cancel monthly, free of charge. Business customers fall outside this rule, but then that distinction has to be in your system.

Since 2 August you have to say it is AI

Since 2 August 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act applies across the union: people must know they are talking to an AI system, unless that is obvious. So if you let an assistant chat or call your customer to arrange maintenance appointments, a disclosure belongs with it. That is one sentence, not a project. The postponement in the digital omnibus package concerned high-risk systems and the marking of generated content; the disclosure duty for direct interaction simply took effect. We build that notice in as standard and do not invoice it separately.

The work itself stays human work

In the Netherlands, only a certified company may work on gas boilers, geysers and gas fires. That is set out in article 6.48 of the Dutch building decree, and the transition period for it ended on 1 January 2024. For larger heating and air conditioning systems, the EPBD inspection duty comes on top, which according to the RVO applies from a nominal capacity of 70 kW. Automation plans, reminds, checks and invoices. It does not inspect and it does not sign off. Anyone who mixes those up is selling you something that is not allowed.

Why this is coming to a head now

The number of appliances needing maintenance is not falling, it is changing shape. According to Statistics Netherlands, in 2024 11.2 percent of homes were completely off natural gas, and another 3.7 percent were nearly off gas, which in practice means a hybrid heat pump alongside the existing boiler. That second group more than doubled in two years. For you as an installer that means not less maintenance but more objects per address: a boiler and a heat pump, with different intervals, different brands and different certificates. Exactly the kind of administration a spreadsheet breaks on.

At the same time, the tooling has become more ordinary than most entrepreneurs think. Statistics Netherlands reports that in 2025, 29.8 percent of small and medium-sized businesses with 10 to 249 staff used AI technology, against 66.2 percent of large companies. So you are not early. You are not late either. You are in the group where the difference is being made right now.

How to start without buying a package first

Most articles on this subject end at buy software X. We do it the other way round: first know where your money is, then decide what to build or buy. You can do this yourself, this week.

• Count your running contracts and look up the average annual value. Two numbers, ten minutes of work.
• Find out how many visits should have taken place last year and how many actually did. The difference is your leak.
• Take the job sheets from one busy month and count how often materials appeared on them that never came back on an invoice.
• Look at which contracts expire in the next six months. If you cannot see that within five minutes, you already know where your first automation belongs.
• Pick one leak. Not four. The one costing you the most money today.

Often the first gain is not in new software but in tying together what you already have. Your contracts are somewhere, your calendar is somewhere, your invoices are somewhere. The problem is usually not that the data is missing. The problem is that nobody puts it side by side at the moment it matters.

What does it cost to have this built?

I start with a free introductory conversation. We discuss what takes time, which systems you use and where automation could help. You then receive a proposal with automation opportunities, integrations, a schedule and costs.

If we build something, a small project of one to two weeks sits between 300 and 5,000 euros, and a medium project of three to six weeks between 5,000 and 12,000 euros. Maintenance afterwards runs through a retainer from 100 euros per month. Cancellable monthly, because we find it odd to tie you to an annual contract when your own customers do not have to do that with you either.

Put that next to your own calculation. If you have 400 contracts and 8 percent leaks away, a project of a few thousand euros pays for itself within a year. If you are at 40 contracts, the answer is probably: do not do it, or only do the reminders. And we will say so.