HVACBossPro Blog — Property Managers & Commercial

Tags and Custom Fields for Commercial HVAC Accounts

Once you have more than a few commercial and rental accounts, your client list starts to blur. Homeowners, landlords, property managers, restaurants and churches all sit in the same list. Finding all your commercial customers for a spring PM reminder, or remembering which manager needs a PO number on every invoice, gets harder every month. Tags and custom fields are how you keep them straight.

Why Commercial Accounts Need Labels

Photos, covered in Proof-of-Service Photos Property Managers Actually Want From Their HVAC Company, document the work. Tags and custom fields document the customer: what kind of account it is, what rules come with it and what the office needs to remember.

Commercial customers come with rules. One needs a PO number. One only approves work over a certain amount in writing. One wants invoices sent to accounts payable, not the manager. If those rules live in somebody's head, they get missed the day that person is out sick.

Tags: Sort the Client List

In HVACBossPro, clients can carry tags such as Commercial, Maintenance Plan and VIP. A tag is a quick label you can filter on. Practical uses:

• Commercial on every property manager, landlord and business account, so you can pull them all up at once.
• Maintenance Plan on accounts with recurring PM visits, so you know who is on a plan and who is calling only when something breaks.
• VIP on your biggest or most important accounts, so the office knows to move them up when the phone rings.

Tags help most when you want to act on a group. Filter the list to Commercial before your spring outreach, and you have every business and manager to contact about getting PM visits on the calendar.

Custom Fields: Store What Only You Need

Custom fields let you add your own fields to client records. Every shop's commercial accounts need slightly different things, so you decide what to track. Common ones for commercial and rental work:

• PO number for businesses that require one on every invoice.
• Approval limit: the dollar amount a tech can spend without asking. “Up to $250 without approval.”
• Accounts payable contact for businesses where the person approving work is not the person paying.
• Number of doors or units so you know the size of the account at a glance.
• Agreement renewal date for accounts on a yearly service agreement.
• Tenant notice rule: “Manager notifies tenants” or “We contact tenants directly.”

Keep the list short. A handful of fields that get filled in is worth more than twenty that nobody uses.

Account Rules vs. Address Details

Not everything belongs on the client. A useful rule of thumb:

• On the client (tags and custom fields): things that are true for the whole account, like PO numbers, approval limits, billing contacts and renewal dates.
• On the address (equipment and access notes): things that are true for one property, like the filter size, the lockbox code, the roof hatch and the business hours.

That split keeps account rules from being repeated forty times and keeps property details from getting lost in a long client note. The account structure is laid out in One Account, Many Addresses: How HVACBossPro Organizes Commercial and Rental Clients.

Tags and Reports Together

Tags become more useful when you look at numbers. Reports in HVACBossPro let you look at your work and billing, and tags let you focus on the accounts you care about. How much commercial work did you do last quarter? Which Maintenance Plan accounts are bringing in the most? Those questions are easier to answer when every commercial account carries the same tag. Reports are covered in Reports by Account: Seeing What Each Commercial HVAC Customer Brings In.

Keep Tags Consistent

Tags only work if everyone uses them the same way. If one person tags a manager “Commercial” and another tags a landlord “Rental Owner,” your filtered list is missing half the accounts. Decide on a small set, write it down, and have the office use only those. When you add a new commercial account, tagging it is part of the setup, along with adding its addresses and setting the billing.

Imported Accounts

If you bring in a manager's address list by CSV import, the addresses are placed on the map automatically. Before you call the account done, go back and add the tags and custom fields to the client. It only takes a minute, and it makes the account findable for everything that comes next.

For how tags and custom fields fit with the rest of commercial service, see the HVACBossPro commercial HVAC software page.