IndustriesFacilities management
An FM contract prices predictable work and delivers unpredictable work. The planned maintenance schedule is what was quoted; the callouts are what actually consumed the year, and they arrive at sites that were priced on an average.
Last reviewed
The accounting problem
01
Planned preventive maintenance is scheduled, estimable and quotable. Reactive callouts are none of those, and whether they fall inside the contract or are separately chargeable is decided by a scope document read differently by both parties. A site with ageing plant consumes several times the reactive hours of a new one on an identical rate.
02
A multi-site agreement is priced as a portfolio, so the profitable buildings subsidise the difficult ones and nobody can name which is which. At renewal the client removes sites from the portfolio — usually the easy ones, because they are cheapest to take elsewhere — and the remaining book is worse than the average that priced it.
03
What is maintained, where it is, how old it is and when it was last serviced determines both the schedule and the liability. Held in a spreadsheet separate from the finance system, the maintenance history and the cost of maintaining it never meet, so the argument for replacing a failing chiller cannot be made with numbers.
04
Site teams are staffed to a service level, so cost is largely fixed while reactive demand varies week to week. Recovery depends on whether hours land on chargeable work or on contract obligation, and the two are only distinguishable if the job records it at the time.
What NetSuite does about it
Planned maintenance generates its jobs on schedule while reactive callouts are raised against the same contract with their chargeability recorded, so the balance between the two is visible per contract rather than argued at renewal.
Revenue is apportioned and cost is captured per site, so a portfolio contract resolves into a ranking of buildings. Renewal is negotiated on which sites earn and which do not, rather than on a single blended margin.
Maintained assets are held with their location, age and service history in the same system as the cost of servicing them, so total cost of ownership per asset is reportable and a replacement case is made with evidence.
Engineer hours post against the job and the site with chargeable status, so labour recovery is measurable and the reactive work being absorbed under the contract is quantified rather than assumed.
Compliance · Saudi Arabia
Contract and callout invoices clear through ZATCA as issued. A labour-heavy site workforce puts GOSI and the Saudization band at the centre of contract pricing rather than at the edge of it.
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