Create agreements

The agreement record establishes who receives service, who pays, what pricing applies, and how long the commitment lasts. Booking setups and invoice setups then define the recurring work and billing.

For the HVAC scenario, start with an agreement for the customer site that covers the annual inspection, quarterly maintenance, and monthly billing arrangements.

Prepare the customer and service information

Before creating the agreement, confirm the business decisions behind it:

• Service site: Identify the service account for the location where work takes place. Use separate agreements for sites represented by different service accounts.
• Billing responsibility: Identify the account that receives the invoices. It can differ from the service account, such as a headquarters account paying for work at a branch.
• Covered work: Decide which inspections, maintenance tasks, products, and services are included, and how additional repairs are handled.
• Pricing and dates: Confirm the agreed price list and the start and end of the service period.
• Generation and scheduling: Decide how far ahead the team needs work orders and whether bookings use a fixed resource or a separate scheduling process.

Check that the required accounts, price list, and work order reference data exist. Prepare the incident types, products, services, and tasks needed for the recurring work before configuring its booking setups. Reuse an appropriate inspection incident type rather than entering the same task list separately for every agreement. For more information, see Create work order templates with incident types.

For equipment-specific service, use customer assets to identify individual equipment and functional locations to identify where work takes place. Confirm that the required records exist before adding them to agreement incidents.

Understand agreement statuses

The agreement's System Status field identifies its stage in the agreement lifecycle and whether it is eligible for automated record generation. This is separate from the status of a generated work order or a technician's booking.

An optional Substatus adds business-specific detail, such as waiting for customer approval while the agreement is in Estimate. Your organization can configure substatuses to match its approval or tracking process. A substatus supplements System Status; it doesn't replace the status used to activate agreement processing.

For configuration instructions, see Set up agreement substatuses.

Create the agreement record

In Field Service, change to Service. Under Service Delivery, select Agreements, and then select New. Complete the agreement's core fields:

Check that the price list contains the products and services used for the agreement work. A price list attached to the record doesn't by itself establish that every required item has the intended price.

Select Save. Saving the agreement creates the parent record; it doesn't by itself define a recurrence or book a technician.

Set generation details and confirm ownership

On the Other tab, review these additional settings:

• Service Territory: Specify the territory for the resulting work orders, if your organization uses territories.
• Record Generation Time: Set the time of day for generating agreement records. If it is blank, Field Service uses the corresponding environment setting.

Record generation time isn't the technician's arrival time. For example, an agreement process can create work orders outside normal office hours while dispatchers schedule the resulting visits during the working day. The booking setup controls how far ahead the work orders are generated and, when direct bookings are enabled, the preferred resource and start time.

Confirm the agreement's Owner with an administrator. Agreement automation runs with the owner's permissions, so ownership is an operational dependency, not just a label for the person who entered the record.

The designated owners of agreements and their booking and invoice setups need permission to create the records their processes generate. Use an appropriate system user or team ownership model and plan for staff changes. A disabled or departed owner's account can break generation.

For an existing active agreement, follow the documented ownership-change procedure rather than simply reassigning it and assuming the background processes continue unchanged. See Change the owner of an agreement.

Review before adding recurrence

Reopen the saved agreement and confirm the accounts, price list, dates, generation details, and owner. Keep its system status at Estimate until the recurring setups are ready for activation.

For the HVAC commitment, the next configuration decisions are:

• An annual inspection booking setup and a quarterly maintenance booking setup.
• A monthly invoice setup for the agreed service fee.
• A scheduling approach for the generated work orders.

For the complete work order setup process, see Set up customer agreements to generate work orders.