July 16, 2026 · 8 min read
Service agreements are the most valuable book of business you have — recurring revenue that keeps trucks busy through the slow months and keeps customers loyal. This release makes them easier to sell and smarter to run: technicians can now close a plan from the customer’s driveway, and plans finally know when they’re finished, so they stop scheduling visits nobody bought.
Here’s everything new. (A quick note on wording: internally we call these “service plans,” but you’ll see them labeled Service Agreement in much of the app — same thing.)
Two everyday frustrations motivated this work.
Selling a plan meant going back to the office. A tech standing in a customer’s basement, having just earned their trust, is in the best possible position to sell a maintenance agreement. But the mobile app could only view plans, not sell them — so the tech had to say “I’ll have the office set that up,” and the moment cooled.
Plans over-scheduled themselves. The old auto-scheduler worked purely off frequency: complete a plan job, and it booked “the next one” — with no sense of when the plan was actually done. A four-visit plan could keep generating phantom follow-ups past what the customer bought, which someone then had to catch and clean up.
Both are fixed. Let’s take them in turn.
Technicians can now sell and activate a service plan directly from the Dispatch Scout mobile app, right where the customer is. Here’s how it plays out in the field:
The whole thing is built so a tech never gets embarrassed in front of a customer. Plans that aren’t ready to sell are flagged and greyed out before the pitch, not after. And if something hiccups during activation, the sale is never lost — the customer still bought the plan, and the office can finish activating it later with one tap. Closing the agreement on-site, with the signature request already on its way, is how a good service visit turns into recurring revenue.
To make a plan sellable from the app, it needs one new thing: a Default Job Type. You’ll find it under Settings > Service Plan Templates, when editing a template — a dropdown labeled “Default Job Type” with the note: “Used for jobs created from plans sold on this template. Required before a technician can sell this plan from the mobile app.”
The reason it exists is a nice illustration of the design philosophy here: picking a job type is a dispatcher’s decision, not a technician’s. Rather than interrupt a sale to ask the tech a back-office question, the template answers it once, up front. A template without a usable default simply reports itself as not-sellable, so the app disables it instead of letting the tech hit a wall mid-sale.
One more nicety in the same area: a new toggle, “Auto-create draft estimate on plan jobs,” lets you decide whether every plan job gets a pre-filled draft estimate attached. It’s on by default; turning it off keeps unused draft estimates from piling up on client records if your workflow doesn’t need them.
This is the heart of “stop over-scheduling.” A service plan sells a fixed, committed number of visits. When the plan activates, Dispatch Scout lays out that commitment as a concrete schedule — one slot per visit the customer is owed.
A plan is now considered finished when every visit in its schedule has been delivered — completed or skipped — with none still pending. At that point the auto-scheduler stops. It will not book another phantom follow-up.
The Service Plan Fulfillment Inbox respects the same logic, so a fully delivered plan drops off the inbox instead of nagging your dispatchers to schedule a visit that isn’t owed. Renewals and extensions are handled as brand-new plans rather than perpetual recurrence — so a finished plan genuinely finishes, and next year’s agreement starts its own clean count. (Older plans that predate this and never had a materialized schedule keep their previous behavior, so nothing you already rely on breaks.)
Some shops love that completing a plan job automatically books the next one. Others would rather schedule every visit by hand so they can batch them, balance routes, or call the customer first. A new account toggle lets you choose.
Under Settings > Service Plans, in the Auto-schedule Next Visit card, the switch reads “Automatically book the next visit when a plan job is completed.”
Two things hold true no matter how you set it: your dispatchers can always schedule the next visit manually from the Fulfillment Inbox, and a plan whose visits are all delivered still stops on its own. The inbox is the safety net — nothing a customer is owed ever falls through the cracks; it just waits for a human instead of a robot.
If you turn automatic scheduling off, the Service Plan Fulfillment Inbox becomes your command center — a working list of every plan that’s due or overdue, with one-click scheduling for each. Automatic or manual, no owed visit ever gets lost.
Previously, a job could only be tied to a service agreement at the moment it was created. If the office forgot to link it, there was no fix — and that visit wouldn’t count against the plan or pick up the plan’s pricing. Now you can attach (or switch) the agreement on a job that already exists.
On the job’s edit form, a Service Agreement card offers a “Linked service agreement” dropdown listing the property’s active agreements. Pick one and save. Linking does two useful things automatically: it makes the job count as an agreement visit when it’s completed, and it pre-fills the plan’s line items onto a new estimate. It’s careful, too — leaving the dropdown blank never silently unlinks an existing agreement, and it won’t clobber an estimate a tech already started. A small fix for a genuinely annoying dead-end.
A house on a maintenance plan gets sold. What happens to the plan? Until now that was an awkward manual cleanup; now it’s an explicit choice built into the transfer flow.
When you transfer a property’s ownership (under Property > Ownership History > Transfer) and it has active plans, Dispatch Scout lists them and asks “What should happen to these service plans?” with three options:
Throughout, the system keeps already-billed and completed work on the previous owner’s record — because that documents service that was actually rendered and paid for. And if the seller has no other properties (they sold up and moved away), the form offers to archive them cleanly, preserving their history while removing them from your active client list. Ownership changes stop being a billing headache.
Yes. A tech pulls up your catalog of sellable plans, shows the customer what each covers and its price, and sells it on the spot. By default the plan activates immediately — booking the first visit, attaching its estimate so the tech can collect payment, and auto-sending the agreement to e-sign.
A plan sells a fixed number of visits. Dispatch Scout now knows when every committed visit has been delivered and treats the plan as finished, so it stops booking a “next” visit the customer never bought. Renewals are new plans, so a finished plan genuinely finishes.
Yes — the “Auto-schedule the next plan visit” toggle under Settings > Service Plans controls it. Off, due plans wait on the Fulfillment Inbox for a dispatcher. Either way, a fully delivered plan stops on its own.
During an ownership transfer you choose to Cancel the plans, Transfer them to the new owner (remaining visits and billing follow automatically), or Leave them as-is for a short transition. Already-billed and completed work stays on the previous owner’s record.
Yes. On the job’s edit form, use the Service Agreement card’s “Linked service agreement” dropdown. Linking counts the job as an agreement visit and pre-fills the plan’s line items on a new estimate.
If you sell maintenance agreements, start by giving your sellable plans a Default Job Type under Settings > Service Plan Templates — that’s the one step that unlocks field sales. Then decide your scheduling style under Settings > Service Plans: let visits book automatically, or route them through the Fulfillment Inbox for a human to schedule. Either way, your plans will now stop themselves when they’re done, follow customers through a home sale cleanly, and be sellable from the exact spot where trust is highest — the customer’s driveway.
Let your techs close service agreements in the field — and let Dispatch Scout stop booking visits your customers never bought.
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