Matching refrigerant bought against refrigerant put into equipment
Cylinders leave the supply house on a distributor invoice. Refrigerant leaves the truck on a work order line. Nobody compares the two numbers, and the A2L changeover made the gap wider, because R-454B cylinders carry different fittings from the R-410A jugs on the same truck. On commercial equipment large enough to fall under federal recordkeeping, the service record has to state the amount added and the date, and it has to survive an inspection. Reconciling what was purchased against what was logged surfaces both the leak you never billed and the cylinder that walked.
The technician photographs the nameplate, then types the model and serial from that photo, usually somewhere with bad light and worse signal.
A field services business is judged on the gap between a customer calling and a technician arriving with the right part. Most of the repeated office work exists to close that gap: booking, dispatching, looking up whether a unit is still under warranty, and finding out what the last technician did.
- ServiceTitan
- QuickBooks Online
- Google Sheets
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if you are residential only and your technicians rarely open a sealed system, since the volume is too small for the variance to mean anything and the log you already keep for the odd changeout is enough. This gets interesting once a commercial route and a recovery machine are involved.
The constraint that shapes it
Licensing is issued by state and often by municipality, per trade, which means not every technician can legally perform every job in every jurisdiction. More on how this sector works.
Two sources of truth. One queue of the rows that do not line up. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Rebuilding an annual operating expense reconciliation from the lease
- Reconciling a broker trust account three ways every month
- Matching a closed transaction back to the lead that produced it
- Collapsing two overlapping MLS feeds into one property list
- Widening a conflicts search past exact spelling
- Rebuilding a billable day from the trail the systems already keep
- How do I track refrigerant cylinders issued to each service truck?
- What refrigerant records does the EPA expect a contractor to keep?
- Why does refrigerant usage not match what we purchased this quarter?
- How do I log R-454B added on a work order?
- Do I need separate recovery cylinders for A2L refrigerant?
Back to field services, or see how this is priced and scoped.