Managing a Rooftop Unit Maintenance Contract Route Across a Dozen Restaurant Sites
A quarterly RTU PM route across twelve restaurants means belts, economizer dampers, condenser coils, and gas-pack heat exchangers — twelve different equipment lists, twelve service histories, and one contract that has to stay profitable. R-Pro's field app handles the on-site work: pull each unit's history, scan the nameplate, diagnose a no-cool call against 600+ real cases, and hand over a receipt before you climb down. The office ERP carries the contract side — recurring quotes, invoices with your own tax setup, parts inventory, and accounting that already reflects what you did on the roof.
On the roof: every RTU on the route, handled in the field app
- Open the customer for each restaurant and you've got that site's full equipment list — the 7.5-ton Carrier on grill exhaust make-up air, the two 5-ton package units over the dining room — with the complete service history from the last PM visit, so you know the economizer actuator you flagged in spring is due to fail.
- Scan the RTU nameplate to auto-fill model, serial, refrigerant charge, and tonnage instead of squinting at a faded sticker and hand-typing it — the data lands on that unit's record straight away.
- A no-cool call mid-route? Run AI fault diagnosis built on 600+ real HVAC and refrigeration cases — high head pressure, tripped on safety, weak airflow over a clogged coil — symptom to likely cause to repair steps, right there on the curb.
- Drop a voice memo while the gas heat is running ('cracked secondary, recommend replacement next quarter') so nothing gets lost between the twelfth site and the truck.
- Issue a service receipt on site the second you finish each unit, and because the field app works fully offline, none of it depends on rooftop cell signal or a locked-down restaurant Wi-Fi.
Back at the office: the contract, billed and booked in the ERP
- Build the recurring PM contract as an itemized quote — labor per visit, filter sets, belts, refrigerant — and reuse it across all twelve sites instead of rebuilding the same scope twelve times.
- Invoice each restaurant on your billing cycle with tax invoices set to your own country's tax name and rate (VAT, GST, or sales tax) — no wrestling a tool built for someone else's tax system.
- Track filters, belts, contactors, and capacitors in inventory so when you load the truck for the route you know what's on the shelf and what to put on a purchase order to your supplier.
- Run accounting across the whole contract — sales from each site, parts purchases, expenses, and net profit — so you can see whether that flat-rate route is actually making money or quietly bleeding on the two oldest units.
- Keep a per-customer ledger for every restaurant in the chain, so a multi-location operator sees one clean account history instead of a shoebox of paper tickets.
The connection: roof work flows into the books, no double entry
- The receipts and service records you create on the roof carry into the office side automatically — you don't re-key twelve visits into accounting that night.
- A part you pulled from the van on site shows up against inventory and the customer's job, so stock counts and billing stay honest without a separate spreadsheet.
- Both the field app and the office ERP run in 10 languages on one subscription, which matters when your route covers a restaurant group with managers who don't all read English.
- Because field and office share the same data, the contract quote, the on-site receipt, the tax invoice, and the accounting entry are all the same job — diagnosed on the roof, billed and booked in the office, with nothing falling through the cracks between sites.
Run the whole route with R-Pro — field app and office ERP, together
R-Pro gives you two strong tools on one subscription: a field app that pulls each RTU's history, scans nameplates, diagnoses faults against 600+ real cases, and issues receipts on site fully offline — and an office ERP that handles your recurring PM quotes, tax invoices, parts inventory, suppliers, and accounting. Diagnose and bill on the roof, quote and book in the office, in 10 languages, with no double entry between them.
Get R-Pro →FAQ
I run the same PM scope across a dozen sites — do I have to build the quote twelve times?
No. Build the itemized PM contract once in the office ERP — labor per visit, filters, belts, refrigerant — and reuse it across every restaurant on the route. Each site keeps its own invoices, tax invoices, and ledger, but the scope and pricing don't get rebuilt for each location.
Rooftop cell signal is terrible and restaurant Wi-Fi is locked down. Does the field app still work?
Yes. The field app is fully offline. You can pull each RTU's service history, scan nameplates, run AI fault diagnosis, record voice memos, and issue a service receipt with no signal at all. It syncs to the office side once you're back in coverage.
How do I keep track of which units I already flagged for follow-up across all the sites?
Each site's equipment carries its own service history, so the economizer actuator or cracked heat exchanger you noted last quarter is right there on that unit's record when you return. Voice memos and on-site receipts attach to the specific RTU, not a general pile of notes.
Can I tell whether the flat-rate contract is actually profitable?
Yes. The office ERP runs accounting across the whole contract — sales from every site, parts purchases, expenses, and net profit — so you can see if the route is making money overall or losing it on the oldest units, instead of guessing at year-end.