Most generator shops treat the service agreement as paperwork — a form the office fills out after the customer says yes. That's backwards. The agreement is where your margin lives for the next three to five years, and for your compliance customers it is the product: they're not buying oil changes, they're buying an auditable record that keeps them out of trouble with an AHJ or a Joint Commission surveyor.
Get it right and the agreement pulls reactive work behind it and renews itself. Get it wrong and you eat after-hours calls, uncovered load banks, and parts you forgot to exclude — for years. Here's what belongs in it.
A service agreement is not a work order
A work order is a one-time job. A service agreement is a standing commitment: recurring scope, on a defined cadence, at a price you're locked into. That difference is exactly why the details matter — every ambiguity becomes a recurring cost, not a one-off.
The line items most agreements forget
These are the omissions that quietly bleed margin. Each one should be an explicit line — in or out, with terms:
- Load bank scope & frequency — percentage and duration, annual vs triennial, who supplies the bank.
- Transfer-switch (ATS) testing cadence — monthly/annual transfer and re-transfer testing, per switch.
- Fuel quality testing & polishing — diesel degrades; say whether testing/polishing is included or billed.
- Battery load testing — the #1 no-start cause; specify it, don't assume it.
- After-hours / emergency response — response window and the rate that applies outside it.
- Trip / travel charges — especially for remote or multi-site accounts.
- Parts markup & what's included — consumables (oil, filters, coolant) in; major components billed.
- Exclusions — what is explicitly not covered, so a failure isn't assumed to be on you.
- Annual escalation clause — a fixed percent so you're not quoting year-one prices in year four.
- Response-time SLA & term/renewal — the commitment and how it auto-renews.
Operator input — SME-5
Price it so you don't bleed in year 2
Price by kW tier and visit cadence, then add load bank and fuel testing as their own line items rather than burying them. Set a target PM-to-T&M ratio so the agreement pulls reactive revenue behind it, and bake in an annual escalation so inflation doesn't eat the back half of the term.
Operator input — SME-4
(A full pricing teardown — the numbers, by tier — is coming as its own guide. This one is about the agreement.)
Tie the scope to the NFPA 110 record
This is the part every template aggregator and local-dealer one-pager skips — and it's the part your hospital and data-center customers actually care about. Each PM tier should specify the NFPA 110 §8.5 permanent record it produces: load %, duration, voltage and frequency per phase, transfer times, exhaust temp, observations, and the named technician who performed it. Put it in the agreement, then make sure your system actually produces it.
The moat
Get the template
Grab the ready-to-use agreement below — the scope, tiers, and line items above, already laid out. Fill in your rates and send it.
Operator input — SME-6