AMC contracts: turning one install into yearly income

An installation pays once. An annual maintenance contract pays every year, costs almost nothing to win from a customer you already have, and quietly blocks the next competitor who knocks on that door.

This is how small service businesses — CCTV, AC, solar, lifts, fire safety — build an AMC book that actually renews.

What the contract should say

Most AMC disputes come from one sentence that was never written down. Put these in the document:

1. What is covered. List the equipment: eight cameras, one DVR, one hard disk, with serial numbers if you have them.
2. How many visits, and roughly when. Two, three or four a year, plus breakdown calls.
3. What a visit includes. Cleaning, checking, testing, a written report. This is the part customers judge you on.
4. What is not included. Parts, hard disks, batteries, physical damage, lightning, rodent damage. Say whether replacements are at cost or at a discount.
5. Response time for a breakdown call, if you promise one at all. Promise what you can keep in your worst week, not your best.
6. Period and price, with GST, and when payment is due.

A comprehensive contract that includes parts is worth more and carries more risk. A non-comprehensive one covers labour and visits only. Price them differently and name them clearly — customers rarely read past the total, so the difference has to be obvious.

Pricing it so it is worth doing

The common way to price a maintenance contract is as a share of what the system cost, typically in the region of 5–15% a year, with comprehensive cover at the higher end. That is a starting point, not a rule. Work back from your own numbers instead:

• What does one visit cost you — technician time, travel, consumables?
• How many visits does the contract promise, and how many breakdown calls do these systems really generate?
• What margin do you want left over?

If the arithmetic only works when nothing goes wrong, the contract is priced too low, and the customer will feel it when you start avoiding their calls.

Plan the visits when you sign, not when they are due

A contract with four visits a year is four appointments, and the business that books them on day one is the business that actually does them. The alternative — remembering in month seven — is how a year passes with one visit and an unhappy customer at renewal.

Each visit is a job with an address, a technician, a checklist and a report. The report is not paperwork; it is the evidence you show at renewal time. "We came four times, here is what we did and the photographs" is a different conversation from "the year is over, please pay again".

Renewal is where the money is

Everything above exists to make one month go well: the month before the contract ends. Handle it like a sale, because it is one.

• 30 days before: a reminder lands on somebody’s list, with the customer and the end date.
• Call with the year’s record — visits done, faults fixed, parts replaced.
• Quote the renewal before the contract lapses, with any price change explained.
• Ask for the referral while they are happy. A customer under AMC is the easiest source of the next install.

A lapsed contract is rarely a decision. It is usually nobody calling, and the customer assuming the relationship ended.

What this looks like in software

None of this needs anything clever. It needs four things to exist in one place:

• The contract: what is covered, the period, the price, the number of visits.
• The visits, booked for the whole year, each with a checklist and a report.
• The renewal reminder, a month before the end, on a real person’s list.
• The invoice, raised from the contract, with GST.

When those four live together, an AMC book grows every year instead of leaking. When they live in a diary, a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group, it leaks at exactly the rate nobody notices.