Service plans and recurring revenue: measuring what each plan earns
Updated 16 October 2026
Maintenance plans, service agreements, memberships and recurring contracts give a field service company work it can count on. They fill the slow months, keep customers coming back, lead to repair and replacement jobs, and raise what a buyer will pay for the company. Each of those depends on the plan earning more than its visits cost. This page lists the measures to track, works through the cost of a plan, covers retention and explains how prepaid plans are recorded.
Eight measures for a plan program
| Measure | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Active plans | Customers currently on a plan or contract. |
| Monthly recurring revenue | The plan revenue the company can expect each month. |
| Renewal rate | The share of plans renewed when their term ends. |
| Attach rate | The share of customers who buy a plan. |
| Margin by plan | What each plan type earns after its visit costs. |
| Visit cost | Labor, travel and materials for each plan visit. |
| Upsell and replacement revenue | Further work sold during plan visits. |
| Cancellations | Customers lost and plans cancelled. |
Mosquito Shield's 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD), the disclosure a franchisor hands a prospective franchisee, reports revenue per customer and customers per territory by quartile. Revenue per Mosquito Shield customer runs from $585.79 to $751.54, which is 1.3 times. Customers per territory run from 50.9 to 139.6, which is 2.7 times. A Mosquito Shield owner reading these measures sees that the count of active customers moves revenue more than the price of each plan.
What a plan costs to deliver
Many companies sell plans as a way to win customers and never check whether the plan itself makes money. A plan can pay off through retention, replacement work and fuller schedules in slow months. It can also use technician hours at a thin margin when the price was set to win the sale and the visit costs were never counted. The plan price has to cover each visit's labor, travel and materials, and the job records show what those visits actually cost.
A heating and cooling company sells a plan for $199 a year with two tune-up visits. Each visit costs $68 in technician time, drive time and filters, so the two visits cost $136. The plan earns $63, a 31.7% margin, before any repair work sold on the visits. If drive time raised each visit's cost to $90, the plan would earn $19. The figures are an illustration.
Retention and the cost of standing still
Every cancelled plan has to be replaced before the program can grow. The renewal rate sets how many new customers the company must sign each year just to hold its size, and the cost of signing each one sets what that replacement work costs. Tracking both turns retention into a dollar figure.
Mosquito Shield reports retention of 82.5%. The Mosquito Shield page works that out to 98 customers lost a year from an average of 559, replaced at a reported $267 each. That is $26,112 a year, 6.5% of average revenue, spent before the business adds a single household. Mosquito Shield reports a customer lifetime value of $2,521, which is 9.4 times the $267 it costs to sign one.
Recording prepaid plans
A plan paid up front is cash for visits not yet made. The books record it as deferred revenue, a liability, and move it into revenue as each visit is done over the plan term. The cash arrives early and helps fund the months before the season. The revenue arrives with the work. A company that books the whole payment as income on the day it arrives shows a profit in the month of sale and carries the cost of the visits into months with no revenue to set against them.
Mosquito Shield's system collected $6,670,757 of the year's revenue before the season started, which is 22.4% of system sales. For an average Mosquito Shield franchisee that is $101,072, or 25.3% of annual revenue, arriving in the winter. A Mosquito Shield owner's books hold that $101,072 as deferred revenue until the spraying visits are made.
Repeat work outside formal plans
Recurring revenue also includes customers who come back without a contract. Their repeat jobs are worth tracking as their own measure, because they show how much of next year's schedule the current year's work has already earned.
Window Genie reports that 43.3% of jobs go to a customer the same business already served that year. The Window Genie page puts that at 375 of the 866 jobs an average business completes, with the median business at 46.6%. A Window Genie owner tracks that share each year alongside any formal plans.
What this means for an owner
A plan program is measured by active plans, recurring revenue, renewals, attach rate, margin, visit cost, upsell and cancellations. Each plan's price covers its visits. Retention sets how many customers must be replaced each year and at what cost. Prepaid plans are deferred revenue until the visits are made. Repeat customers outside plans are counted as their own measure.
Track plans in the books
Averan sets up plan revenue so it is recorded over its term, and reports plan margin and renewals each month. The controller service page describes that work. The HVAC finance page covers maintenance plans in a heating and cooling company.
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