HVAC and refrigeration servicing software: a UK guide

Last updated: August 2026

It is ten past seven on a July morning and the phone has already gone twice. A pack at the convenience store is running warm, and the customer wants to know how long the food has been above temperature. A managing agent has raised a lift shut-in on their portal, and the four hour clock started when they pressed the button, not when somebody in your office read the email. Meanwhile the planner on the office wall says forty-one PPM visits are due this month, and nobody can say how many have actually been done.

None of that is a scheduling problem. It is a records problem wearing a scheduling problem’s clothes.

Three trades, one commercial shape

Air conditioning, commercial refrigeration and lift servicing are three crafts with three apprenticeships and almost no shared ticket. What makes them one business type is the commercial shape: the plant belongs to somebody else, sits on somebody else’s premises, and was probably installed by somebody else.

Five revenue lines recur. PPM, the scheduled contract visits, invoiced monthly or quarterly whether or not anything broke. Statutory inspection, a subset that a law names, and not the same event as a service. Reactive callouts against a response time, with out of hours cover in the same contract. Remedials, the chargeable work a PPM visit found, where most of the margin lives. And hire: temporary chillers, air handling units, spot coolers, boilers and dehumidifiers, either cover while a client’s own plant is down or a planned seasonal hire. Hire is covered here as an adjacent revenue line rather than in a guide of its own, because the firms doing it are usually the firms already maintaining the plant.

The work is commercial almost throughout, and commercial refrigeration has no domestic equivalent. Even lift servicing in a block of flats reaches you through a managing agent with a service charge behind it. Domestic boiler work is a different business with its own guide: job management software for plumbers.

Firms range from the one to three van refrigeration business serving pubs and convenience stores, through the five to thirty engineer AC and ventilation contractor that is the centre of gravity here, to the independent lift company maintaining buildings whose lift it did not install.

The job exists in the client’s system before it exists in yours

For anything subcontracted from a facilities management provider or a managing agent, the job is raised in the client’s CAFM, given the client’s job number and timestamped by the client. Vantify, formerly Elogbooks, states it spans over 45,000 users across 20,000 properties. Corrigo, Concept Evolution, Planon, QFM and Trackplan sit alongside it.

Two consequences, and both cost money. The SLA clock belongs to the client, so attendance is measured from their timestamp: arriving on time and updating the portal late is, contractually, arriving late. And it multiplies. Six FM clients means six portals, six sets of credentials, six job numbering conventions and six definitions of “complete”, while the same job still has to exist in your own system to be scheduled, costed and invoiced.

The vocabulary matters here. Response time, fix time and rectification are three separate clauses, and getting on site in four hours while the part takes a fortnight can be full compliance. Attendance is arriving; completion is closing the job in the client’s system, often days later. No product removes that double entry, and working inside somebody else’s system is covered in facilities management subcontractors.

The compliance calendar belongs to the machine, not the address

F-Gas leak check intervals are set by each machine’s charge in tonnes of CO2 equivalent: kilograms of refrigerant multiplied by its global warming potential, divided by 1,000. From 5 to under 50 tonnes the check is at least annual, 50 to under 500 tonnes at least six monthly, and 500 tonnes or more at least quarterly with automatic leak detection compulsory. See checking F gas equipment for leaks. The interval belongs to the machine, so the plan is built at asset level then bundled into site visits.

Records are the part that bites later. Equipment holding 5 tonnes CO2 equivalent or more needs five years of records: gas in, gas out, the dates and results of every mandatory leak check, and the name, address and certificate number of every company that worked on it. See the record keeping guidance. The duty sits on the operator, but the data only ever exists in the contractor’s hands, and most practical F-Gas failures trace back to that seam. Servicing other operators’ equipment also requires company certification, renewed every three years. Great Britain and Northern Ireland have diverged since EU exit, so a firm working both sides of the Irish border works two rule sets.

Three further cycles sit on the same plant. Air conditioning inspections to CIBSE TM44 fall due at least every five years on systems over 12kW, by an accredited energy assessor, with a £300 penalty in England and Wales. Regulation 9(3) of LOLER 1998 requires thorough examination every six months for equipment lifting persons and twelve for other lifting equipment; see HSE guidance for lift dutyholders, and note that Northern Ireland has its own 1999 regulations. Qualifying pressure systems need a written scheme of examination as well, and cooling towers add local authority notification and legionella testing and water hygiene. PUWER regulation 5 is why the plant room logbook matters at all: where machinery has a maintenance log, it must be kept up to date.

What the contract covers, and what it does not

The PPM price is built bottom up from the asset register: assets, multiplied by visits a year, multiplied by labour hours a visit, at a charge out rate, plus consumables, travel and a share of out of hours cover. Then it is adjusted for what the contract includes.

The lift industry has the clearest taxonomy, and the same three way split appears in AC and refrigeration under other names. Basic, or labour only, covers the scheduled visits and a service sheet, with every part and callout billed separately. Semi-comprehensive adds a capped number of emergency callouts, with parts above a value cap still chargeable. Comprehensive includes most parts and unlimited callouts, excluding named wear items such as ropes, oil changes and batteries. None of those terms is defined or regulated, so two comprehensive quotes can differ by thousands because one excludes the controller and the other does not.

The price is usually written against SFG20, the BESA maintenance standard: more than 1,500 schedules across 110 asset classes, tasks coded red for statutory and amber for best practice. “Maintained in accordance with SFG20” is the standard tender phrase, and the subscription is a real cost for a five engineer firm.

Lifts add a wrinkle outsiders get wrong. The thorough examination is normally carried out by an independent engineer surveyor working for an inspection company allied to the building’s insurer, not by you. That surveyor issues a report listing defects you did not write and may disagree with. The client, who owns the duty, then asks you to price them, and whether an item was maintenance already covered or a chargeable repair is argued in that gap every six months.

Where the money leaks

Remedials are where contract margin is recovered. The engineer writes “compressor 2 drawing high amps, recommend replacement” on the sheet; somebody then has to price it, send it to a named person at the managing agent and chase the approval. Without a system that pipeline is a pile of job sheets, and because contract revenue arrives regardless, an unsent quote is never experienced as a lost sale.

Out of hours is the second leak. The three in the morning callout arrives on a mobile, is attended without a job number, is fixed, and reaches the office two days later as a text, sometimes. Three losses follow: work never invoiced, premium hours not evidenced when the client queries the rate, and on call hours not counted toward the 48 hour average. Acas sets out the test, which turns on how the arrangement works rather than what the rota calls it.

Then the invoice. No purchase order, no payment. FM providers commonly gate the invoice on evidence: the signed job sheet, the photographs, the completed asset record and the portal closure, and they reject the invoice rather than the job if any of it is missing.

HMRC’s CISR14090 puts installation of heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems inside the Construction Industry Scheme and repairs outside it, so a firm servicing chillers all year and installing a VRF system in October is outside CIS for the maintenance and inside it for the installation. The VAT domestic reverse charge follows the same list of services. Check your own position with your accountant.

Hire leaks differently. The customer stays liable for the charge and the equipment until it is formally off hired and collected, not when they stop using it, which is why an off hire reference issued at the point of the request is standard practice. A maintenance job has a start and an end; a hire has an on hire date, an open ended middle, an off hire request and a collection, and no jobbing system models that.

How Dispatch helps

Dispatch gives the callout and the planned visit one record, so what happened on site reaches the office the same day rather than at the end of the week.

A completion report needs a written write up and up to twelve photographs before a job can be marked Completed, the default for every business. That is the callout record a refrigeration customer asks for in writing, produced on the day by the person who did the work. Certificates, F-Gas records, RAMS and method statements attach to the job as PDFs, images or Word files up to 25 MB and are kept for the life of the job. Completion history for a customer is grouped by site address, so a client with four buildings reads as four histories rather than one stream.

Job chat gives a two way thread with the customer, photographs included, from a link sent by WhatsApp or text. Repeats, switched on in Settings, books a maintenance series automatically. Book onto a week calendar where a clash warns rather than blocks.

Then quote the remedial, invoice from the phone and take card payment into your own Stripe account, with overdue invoices chasing themselves at 3, 10 and 21 days.

Every feature is on every plan, everything runs in the UK, and there is a free plan to try on one contract.