Your first commercial service agreement: scope, pricing and an SLA you can actually keep

Your first commercial service agreement will almost certainly be for a small building, and the mistake most residential shops make is writing it like a big one. They promise a four-hour emergency response around the clock, price the maintenance visits like residential tune-ups, and leave the scope as "maintain HVAC equipment." Six months later they're losing money on a customer who thinks they're under-delivering.

A good first commercial service agreement is narrower than you'd expect: a scope written equipment by equipment, billing terms the customer's accounts payable department can process, a response time you can staff on your worst week, and a per-site price you built from hours, not from a competitor's flyer. This post walks through each, with a worked price for a three-rooftop-unit retail site.

Who your first commercial customer really is

The commercial market looks intimidating from the outside: office towers, hospitals, chillers. That's not where most residential shops start, and the federal data shows why.

The 2018 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey is still the most recent full edition from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.¹² Its message for a service contractor: the long tail of the commercial market is retail shops, restaurants, small offices, churches, clinics and strip centers, usually running packaged rooftop units or split systems your techs already know. The owner or a property manager is the buyer, and the deciding factors are reliability, a clear invoice and someone who answers.

Scope: write it unit by unit

"Preventive maintenance of HVAC equipment" is not a scope. It's an argument waiting to happen. The scope should be an equipment schedule attached to the agreement, with one row per unit, and a task list per visit type.

For task lists, you don't have to invent a standard. ANSI/ASHRAE/ACCA Standard 180, Standard Practice for Inspection and Maintenance of Commercial Building HVAC Systems (current edition 2018), sets minimum inspection and maintenance tasks for commercial HVAC.³ Referencing it in your agreement tells a property manager you work to a published practice, and it gives your techs a defensible checklist. Adapt it; don't paste it.

The exclusion list feels negative to write. It's the most customer-friendly page in the agreement, because it's the page that prevents the argument.

Commercial billing terms: PO, NTE and net terms

Commercial customers don't pay like homeowners. A residential customer taps a card in the driveway. A commercial customer's accounts payable department matches your invoice to a purchase order, checks it against an approval limit, and pays on a schedule. If your paperwork doesn't fit their process, you wait.

The purchase order and the NTE are the two that decide whether you get paid. The NTE in particular needs a rule that techs follow on the roof: when a repair will exceed the limit, stop, document, request approval, and don't touch it until the approval arrives. A $2,400 compressor job done on a $750 NTE without approval is a collection problem you created.

If you do federal government work, the Prompt Payment Act requires agencies to pay interest on late payments of proper invoices. The Treasury rate for July 1 to December 31, 2026 is 4.75%.⁴ For everyone else, late fees are whatever your agreement says, so say something.

The SLA you can keep

A service level agreement promises time. Owners get burned by not separating three different clocks:

1. 1

   Response

   How fast you acknowledge the call and confirm a plan. This is a phone or portal promise, and it's the cheapest to keep.

2. 2

   Arrival (on site)

   How fast a qualified tech is at the equipment. This is a staffing promise, and it's the expensive one.

3. 3

   Resolution

   When the problem is fixed or made safe. Don't promise this; parts, access and approvals aren't in your control. Promise a status update interval instead.

Then define priority levels in the customer's terms, not yours. An example structure for a shop with one on-call tech:

These times are an example, not an industry standard. The point is the structure, and the honest after-hours line. Before you sign anything, do this test: look at your worst week last July. If a P1 came in at 3 p.m. that Thursday, who would have gone, and what would they have left? If the answer is "nobody" or "a residential no-heat with an elderly homeowner," your SLA is too aggressive.

Pricing per site: a worked example

Everything below is a hypothetical example. Build it again with your own labor rate and times.

The site: a small retail building with three 7.5-ton rooftop units. Four visits a year: two major (spring cooling, fall heating) and two filter-and-belt visits.

Labor hours. Count everything, not just wrench time.

Labor price. At a hypothetical billable rate of $145 an hour, 16.5 hours is $2,392.50. Your rate should come from your own costs; the labor rate calculator does that math. For a sense of the floor: BLS put total compensation for private-industry installation, maintenance and repair workers at $49.01 an hour in June 2026, $33.61 in wages and $15.41 in benefits, before trucks, tools or overhead.⁵ Sixteen and a half hours at that cost is about $809 of direct labor.

Consumables. Filters at $40 per unit per visit (3 units × 4 visits = $480 cost) and belts at $25 per unit on major visits (3 × 2 = $150 cost). At a 1.5 markup, that's $945.

SLA allowance. If this agreement includes after-hours P1 coverage, add a share of your on-call cost. At $15,600 a year spread over, say, 12 commercial accounts, that's $1,300 per site. Without after-hours coverage, it's zero, and after-hours calls are billed at your after-hours rate.

So the same building is roughly $3,340 a year with business-hours response, or $4,640 with after-hours arrival. Quote both. Many small-building owners pick the lower one once they see the difference, and the ones who pick the higher one are paying for what it costs you.

Two more pricing rules that save first-timers:

• Price per site, not per portfolio. A property manager with eight sites will ask for one price. Build it from eight site prices so you know which sites lose money (usually the one with a two-story roof hatch and no ladder).
• Write in a renewal uplift. A fixed annual increase in the agreement, say 3% to 5%, beats renegotiating every year. Labor costs rise whether or not you ask.

What to look for in your software before you sign

Commercial work breaks residential workflows in specific places. Before the first PM visit, check that your system can:

In TradesWork, multi-location and commercial covers most of that list: per-customer PO required, a default not-to-exceed that an invoice can't pass without a recorded approval, net terms from 0 to 180 days, billing contacts, and multi-site service agreements with PM visit plans, covered equipment, SLA response hours, auto-renew and a renewal uplift. Visits become jobs 21 days ahead and billing consolidates to one invoice per customer per month. Honest limits: SLA tracking is a countdown on the job, not a rules engine that escalates on its own, PO blocking is off by default, and there's no ServiceChannel work-order connection or multi-property customer portal yet. If your first account requires a portal like that, plan for the double entry.

For the residential side of agreements, our maintenance agreement template and the HVAC maintenance plans guide cover membership-style plans. If your commercial work leans to kitchens or refrigeration, see the commercial kitchen and mechanical industry pages.

A one-page checklist before you sign

General information, not legal advice. Have your attorney review commercial agreement language, especially indemnity, insurance and lien provisions, which vary by state.