The best way to manage recurring customer jobs

Last updated: September 2026

Two different kinds of repeat

It helps to separate them, because they need different handling.

Cycles are short and frequent: a cleaning round every fortnight, a maintenance visit every month, a service call every quarter. The risk is drift, where a visit slips a week and then another, until the round has moved and nobody agreed to it.

Renewals are annual and compliance-shaped: a gas safety certificate, an alarm service, a legionella review, an inspection due twelve months after the last one. The risk is silence, where nobody is reminded until the customer notices.

A round that drifts costs you reputation. A renewal that is forgotten costs you the customer and sometimes puts them at risk, which is worse.

Why memory fails at this specifically

Recurring work has no trigger. A callout rings your phone. A quote has a customer waiting for an answer. A repeat visit has nothing at all: its only prompt is the calendar, and only if somebody put it there.

Which is why the standard fixes do not hold. A note in a diary survives one year. A spreadsheet of renewal dates is maintained enthusiastically for four months. A reminder in one person phone leaves with that person.

The only reliable answer is to have the next visit created the moment the last one is done, so the work exists in the system rather than in intention.

Where Dispatch fits

Recurring visits are switched on in Settings, and off until a business turns them on. Once on, you tick the box when raising a job and choose a frequency.

The frequencies are deliberately short and fixed: every week, every 2 weeks, every 4 weeks, every month, or every year. It can run indefinitely, end on a date, or stop after a set number of visits, and you can pause it, end it or skip a single date when a customer goes on holiday without unpicking the whole schedule.

Every 4 weeks and every month are genuinely different for a cleaning round, which is why both exist. And the annual option is what covers the compliance renewal: last visit done, next one already on the calendar twelve months out.

What there is not, being plain: no complex patterns like the first Tuesday of every month, and no automatic renewal quoting. If your round needs that kind of rule, you will have to place the visits yourself.

Contracts and rounds: a few practicalities

• Price the round, not the visit. Customers on a cycle should know the monthly figure, and it makes your own forecasting far easier.
• Send the confirmation anyway. Regular customers still appreciate the email that says Thursday, and it heads off the access problem before you arrive.
• Keep the history per address. For a customer with several properties, what matters is what was done at each one, not a single list per customer.
• Review the round twice a year. Rounds accumulate: the site that has quietly doubled in size, the customer who now wants two hours instead of one. Repricing a round nobody has looked at in three years is the most common margin fix in contract work.

The renewal conversation

For annual compliance work, the visit being on the calendar is half the job. The other half is telling the customer early enough that they can plan.

Four weeks out is about right for domestic work, longer for anything commercial that needs coordinating with a tenant. A short message saying the certificate expires on a date, and that you have pencilled in a visit, converts almost every time: you are not selling, you are reminding them of a deadline they already have.

That is also when the renewal turns into next year work: book while you are there, and the cycle continues without anybody chasing it.

What to do about the round you already run

Do not try to reconstruct three years of history. Take the customers you currently visit regularly, put the next visit on the calendar with the right frequency, and let the schedule build from there.

Then check one thing: for each customer, is the price still right for the time it now takes? That question usually pays for the whole exercise.

If your regular work is compliance-driven, gas safety certificates covers the twelve-month landlord round in detail, and for cleaning rounds commercial cleaning contracts covers cover and absence, which is the harder half.