HVACBossPro Blog — Quotes & Estimates

Quoting HVAC Tune-Ups: Setting Up Spring and Fall Visits as Estimate Lines

Tune-ups are the bread and butter of a heating and air company. They fill the schedule in the shoulder seasons, they catch small problems before they become no-heat calls in January, and they put your truck in front of the same houses twice a year. They are also the easiest thing in the business to quote, if the tune-up is set up properly on your service list.

Tune-Ups Start on the Service List

Like the diagnostic covered in Pricing Your HVAC Diagnostic Fee and Putting It on the Estimate, a tune-up is a service list item with a name, a price and a description. Once it is there, quoting a tune-up is a single line on an estimate, and the office can do it in the time it takes the customer to read out their address.

Most shops set up at least two tune-up lines:

• Spring AC tune-up (or heat pump cooling check).
• Fall furnace tune-up (or heat pump heating check).

Some add separate lines for heat pumps, mini-splits, boilers or a second system in the same house. If a customer has an upstairs and downstairs unit, a “Tune-up — additional system” line at a lower price keeps the quote simple.

Say What the Tune-Up Includes

“Tune-up” means different things at different companies. The customer has no way of knowing whether yours includes a coil rinse, a filter change or just a look. Put it in the description. A practical spring tune-up description might read:

• Check thermostat operation and settings
• Check capacitor and contactor
• Rinse outdoor condenser coil
• Check refrigerant pressures and temperatures
• Clear and flush the condensate drain line
• Replace filter (customer-supplied or charged separately)

A fall furnace tune-up might cover the burners, flame sensor, igniter, blower, filter and a safety check of the venting. Keep the list honest. Do not list anything your techs do not actually do on every visit.

Pricing a Tune-Up

A tune-up is priced to cover a scheduled visit of a fairly predictable length. Because the work is planned and the truck can run several of them in a row on a tight route, many shops price tune-ups below a diagnostic, using them to build a relationship rather than to make the day's profit. Example numbers like a $99 tune-up are common, but your own cost per visit should set the price.

Decide in advance what happens if the tune-up turns up a problem. The cleanest approach is that the tune-up price covers the inspection and the basic maintenance, and any repair found is quoted separately from the service list. Say so in the description: “Any repairs found will be quoted before work is done.”

Filters and Small Extras

Filters cause more confusion on tune-up invoices than anything else. If your tune-up includes a standard filter, say which sizes. If it does not, add a “Filter — standard 1 inch” line and a “Filter — media 4 or 5 inch” line to the service list.

This is where equipment details help. In HVACBossPro the filter size is part of the equipment record, along with the system type, brand, model, tonnage and unit location. Fill it in on the estimate, and the tech arriving for the tune-up already knows to bring a 16x25x1 instead of guessing. That detail is covered in Equipment Details on the HVAC Estimate: Fill In the System Once and It Carries Onto the Job.

From a One-Time Tune-Up to a Plan

A single tune-up quote is a good opportunity to offer a maintenance plan. If the spring visit is $99 and the fall visit is $99, a plan that covers both for a yearly price, with a reduced diagnostic or priority scheduling as a perk, is an easy decision for a lot of homeowners.

On the estimate, you can show both: the single tune-up as one line and the maintenance plan as another, so the customer picks. Once a plan is set up on the client, HVACBossPro brings the next visit due on its own. A plan set to 180 minimum days between visits shows up on the Waiting List map when it comes due, colored by status, so the spring and fall tune-ups never depend on someone remembering to call. Quoting plans gets its own guide later in this series.

Quoting Tune-Ups Fast in the Busy Season

When the first hot week hits, the phone rings constantly and half of the calls are “can someone come check my AC before it gets worse?” That is when a single, well-described tune-up line pays off. The office picks it, fills in what the customer knows about the system, sends the estimate, and moves on to the next call. The customer approves online and the approved estimate becomes a scheduled job.

Many shops run one van on tune-ups and another on repair calls during the season, so tune-up work does not get bumped every time an emergency comes in. The dispatch board lets you filter by van and drag work between days when the weather changes the plan.

The next guide covers the harder quote: the repair the tech finds once the panel is off. For the overview of quoting, approvals and scheduling in one place, return to the HVACBossPro HVAC estimate software page.