Recurring work orders for monthly maintenance visits?

Question

We have 40+ customers on monthly HVAC maintenance contracts. Right now our dispatcher is manually creating work orders each month which is eating up half her day. My team can't move forward with scaling this program until we automate this.

Does FieldPulse support auto-generating work orders on a schedule? If so, can they pre-populate with the customer address and assign to the same technician who did the last visit?

Need this working by Q4. Thanks.

Priya Nair (Staff) · Accepted Answer

Hi Brandon! Great question — yes, FieldPulse supports recurring work orders, and this sounds like exactly the use case we built it for. Setting up monthly recurring work orders: Go to Work Orders → Recurring Work Orders Click Create Recurring Template Set frequency to Monthly and pick the day of the month Select your customer and service location — this auto-populates on each generated order Choose Assign to previous technician under assignment preferences, or assign to a specific tech Once saved, FieldPulse will auto-generate the work order 7 days before the scheduled date (you can adjust this buffer in settings). The dispatcher just reviews and confirms rather than building from scratch. Here's the full walkthrough: Recurring Work Orders: Setup and Management Let me know if you need help configuring this for your 40 contracts — happy to jump on a quick call.

Josh Mercer · Answer

Pro tip: if you've got customers who want the same time slot each month (like "first Tuesday morning"), the recurring template won't lock the time automatically — you'll still need to set that on each generated order.

What I do is create a separate Service Agreement record with the customer's preferred time window noted, so my dispatcher has it right there when she's confirming the generated orders. Saves the phone tag.

Also heads up: if a technician leaves, the "previous technician" setting will bump to unassigned rather than auto-reassigning. Worth having a backup plan for.

Gwen Albright · Answer

Brandon — strongly recommend you also set up a Work Order Template attached to your recurring series. We learned the hard way that if you don't pre-define the checklist and required photos, you'll get 40 different ways of 'complete' back from the field. We have a Monthly HVAC Maintenance template that auto-attaches to all our recurring orders. Forces the tech to capture filter condition, refrigerant pressure, and customer signature every time. Work Order Templates if you need the setup steps. Also consider whether you want these generating 7 days out or 14 — we switched to 14 because customers started rescheduling and we were doing a lot of manual shuffling.