Few trades are busier right now than the heating industry: the retrofit boom toward heat pumps fills the order books, and in winter the service business piles on top. The problem is rarely demand, it’s processing it: whoever drowns in paperwork leaves revenue and funding deadlines on the table.
Maintenance contracts: the backbone
Burner service, heat pump check, descaling: maintenance is the predictable part of the heating year, and it belongs managed as a contract asset: system, customer, rhythm, last service, agreed price. From that, the autumn routes build themselves, and every completed service becomes an invoice with a QR payment slip without retyping anything. A side effect: your maintenance base is the best pipeline for retrofits, because you’re the first to know which system is heading into its last winter.
The winter peak: emergency callouts without paper chaos
Heating dead at minus five degrees is an emergency with a right to a surcharge. To make sure the margin actually arrives, the same rule applies as for a plumbing emergency callout: job on the phone, hours and materials recorded on site, surcharges as fixed line items, invoice the next day. In January, with three engineers out at once, the difference between paper and an app is a weekend of office work per week.
Retrofits: quote, funding, stages
A heat pump conversion is a project with a long lead time: site visit, sizing, quote, funding application (cantonal programmes, often via the building programme), delivery lead time, installation, commissioning. What matters digitally:
- A quote that’s fast and easy to understand, with variants (e.g. air/water vs. brine) and a clear boundary against electrical and drilling work (guide). Mention the funding application, but promise nothing that the canton decides.
- An advance payment schedule tied to the stages; the heat pump is ordered and paid for long before it runs.
- Project documentation: photos, commissioning protocol, and settings attached to the project. This is the basis for the maintenance contract and for warranty cases.
Does it pay off?
A heating business with 200 maintenance visits and 25 retrofits a year gains on three fronts: fully billed emergency callouts, maintenance invoices without an evening in the office, and advance payment schedules that shorten the expensive stock financing. Against that stand software costs that a single cleanly billed emergency callout day covers. What MeisterOffice looks like for heating installers is shown on the heating page; the hourly rate calculator gives you your own rate.