Recurring work orders for monthly maintenance visits?

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:

1. Go to Work Orders → Recurring Work Orders
2. Click Create Recurring Template
3. Set frequency to Monthly and pick the day of the month
4. Select your customer and service location — this auto-populates on each generated order
5. 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.

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.

Set this up Friday. Generated 43 work orders for October automatically. Dispatcher time on this task dropped from ~6 hours to 20 minutes of review.

One thing I hit: customers with multiple locations need separate recurring templates per location — there's no "all locations for this customer" option. Not a blocker, just something to plan for if you're in the same boat.

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.

Gwen's absolutely right on the template attachment — that's become our standard recommendation for maintenance contracts. The 7 vs 14 day buffer is account-wide though, so if you need different lead times for different contract types, that's a feature request we're tracking.