GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Tune-Ups & Maintenance Plans

Garage Door Maintenance Software: The Complete Guide to Yearly Tune-Up Plans

Most garage door companies grow on emergency calls. A spring breaks at 7am, the car is stuck inside, and the homeowner calls whoever answers first. That work pays, but it is lumpy. Some weeks the phone rings off the hook and some weeks the vans sit. A yearly tune-up plan is the steadiest work a garage door company can sell, and it only works if the software remembers every plan customer for you.

This guide walks through how a tune-up program runs in GarageDoorBossPro, from the sale to the visit to the renewal. Each section points to a deeper guide in this series.

Where Tune-Up Plans Fit

Tune-ups are one part of the garage door maintenance software side of GarageDoorBossPro. Repairs, installs, estimates and commercial accounts all live in the same system, which matters because a tune-up customer is almost always a repair or install customer first.

The pattern is simple. You fix a door or put in a new opener. Before the tech leaves, the customer is offered a yearly tune-up at your price. The customer says yes, a card goes on file, and twelve months later the visit shows up on its own. The tech inspects the door, the office prints the report, recommendations become estimates, the card is charged, and the next year starts counting.

None of those steps are hard. What breaks most tune-up programs is the year in between, when the plan lives in a spreadsheet or in somebody's memory. Software that does the remembering is the whole point.

Setting Up the Plan

A tune-up plan in GarageDoorBossPro is a service on your service list with a minimum number of days between visits. For a residential yearly tune-up that is 365. For a commercial rolling door or a loading dock, it might be 90. You set your own price, such as a $129 tune-up, and the plan carries that price to every visit.

When a visit is completed, the count starts over. When the days run out, the visit comes due. Nobody has to set a calendar reminder or look up who signed up last October. The details are in Setting a 365-Day Recurring Garage Door Tune-Up by Minimum Days Between Visits.

If you already have a list of tune-up customers in a spreadsheet, bring them in by CSV import. Imported addresses are placed on the map automatically, so last year's customers show up where they live from day one.

The Waiting List: Who Is Due and Who Is Late

Every visit that comes due lands on the Waiting List, a live map and list in the office. Pins are colored by status: not due yet, due now, and overdue once a visit has gone past a 7-day grace. New service requests show on the same screen.

That map is where the office plans the week. A cluster of due-now pins on the north side becomes Tuesday for Van 2. An overdue pin near a repair call gets added to that route. The office assigns visits to a van and a day on the dispatch board, auto-routes them Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, and the tech's phone shows the same order.

Plenty of shops run one van on repairs and emergency spring calls and one on installs and tune-ups. Tune-ups are the flexible work. They fill open spots without bumping the customer whose door will not open.

The Visit: A Door Safety Inspection

A homeowner on a tune-up plan is paying for a trained tech to look the whole door over once a year. The checklist is the deliverable. On the tech app, each tune-up has a door safety inspection checklist with thirteen items:

• Springs, cables & drums, rollers, hinges & brackets
• Tracks aligned & secured, door balance
• Auto-reverse safety test, photo-eye sensors, opener force & limits
• Lubrication, bottom seal & weatherstripping, emergency release, keypad & remotes

The tech also records readings such as door size, spring turns, balance lbs off, door age, opener age, estimated spring cycles used and issues found. Then a condition (Good, Needs attention or Repair recommended) and written recommendations. The software records what the tech found. The tech, who is trained on springs and cables, does the work. Homeowners should never be told to adjust springs or cables themselves.

The doors and opener saved on the house show right on the job card, so the tech walks up already knowing it is a 16x7 insulated steel door with a belt-drive opener installed in 2019.

The Report and the Estimate

When the tech taps Complete, the office sees the inspection on the job and can print a Garage Door Safety Inspection report for the homeowner. It is the piece of paper that makes a tune-up feel like more than a squirt of lubricant.

The recommendations on that report are also your next jobs. Worn rollers, a cracked bottom seal, an opener that has seen better days. The office builds an estimate from your service list, the customer approves it online, and the approved estimate becomes the scheduled job. Unanswered estimates get follow-up emails. See Turning Tune-Up Recommendations Into Garage Door Repair Estimates.

Getting Paid and Keeping the Customer

Plan customers sign up with a card on file, either in the customer app, through your website sign-up form, or with the tech after a repair. A website sign-up lands in Form Responses and converts to a client in one click. The plan can auto-charge on completion or on a schedule, and invoices carry line items and sales tax.

Before each visit, automated reminder texts and emails go out. Customers choose night-before, when-they're-next and tech-arrived alerts, and on visit day the customer app shows where they are in line on a live map. Texts are counted against your plan's monthly allowance of 500, 1,000 or 2,000 texts sent and received on Start, Pro or Crew.

Renewal is not a separate sales call. The visit is completed, the days start counting and next year's visit comes due. Every visit adds to the door and opener history saved on the house, which makes the next tune-up faster and the next estimate easier to explain.

Commercial accounts work the same way on shorter intervals. A property manager, HOA or commercial account set to Monthly gets one statement each month covering every address, each line labeled with its address.

The rest of this series covers each step in detail, starting with the sale itself. For the full feature list and plan prices, go back to the garage door maintenance software page.