If you sell equipment and also service it, there is a question your team answers many times a week: what does this customer have, and what are we on the hook for?
A customer calls about a breakdown. To help them, someone needs the serial number, the model, where it is installed, whether it is under warranty or a service contract, and what was done on the last visit. In a lot of businesses, those answers live in four places: the CRM, the accounting system, a service contract spreadsheet and somebody's memory.
Equipment dealers and service companies describe this problem constantly, and it gets worse with every unit you sell.
The spreadsheet that runs the service side
Most businesses start with a spreadsheet: one row per unit, with the customer, serial number, install date, contract dates and price. It works for the first few hundred units.
Then it starts to strain:
- One customer owns several units, at different sites, on different contracts
- Some units are sold through resellers, so the company you bill is not the one you service
- Units get swapped out, and the serial number on file is no longer the one on the wall
- Renewals are missed because nobody filtered the sheet that month
- The service team cannot see it from the field
At that point, the spreadsheet is quietly costing you renewals and making every service call slower.
Think in units, not customers
The fix starts with one shift: treat each piece of equipment as its own record, not as a line on the customer.
Each unit should have:
- Identity: make, model, serial number
- Ownership: which company owns it, and which site it is at
- Billing: who you invoice, which may be a reseller or head office
- Cover: warranty dates, service contract, renewal date
- History: every service visit, part replaced and issue reported
Then link it to everything else: the customer in your CRM, the contract, the tickets and the invoices. When someone looks up a serial number, they see the whole story in one place.
Where it can live
You have a few options, depending on what you already use:
- Inside your CRM. HubSpot and other CRMs support custom records. A unit can be its own record, linked to companies, contacts, tickets and deals. This works well if your team already lives in the CRM.
- Inside your ERP. Systems like SAP Business One can track serialized items and service calls. This works well if operations already lives in the ERP.
- A dedicated tool or portal. When the service side is complex, or customers need to see their own equipment, a purpose-built layer on top of your systems is often cleaner.
The right answer depends on where your team works every day. The wrong answer is a fifth system nobody opens.
Let it remind you
Once the data is in one place, the useful part is automatic:
- Renewal reminders that go to the account manager before a contract lapses
- A list of units coming up for scheduled service
- Alerts when a unit has had repeat issues
- A clear picture of which customers have equipment with no contract at all, which is often your easiest sale
Give customers a window into it
The next step many dealers take is a customer portal: a place where customers log in, see the equipment they own, its service history and contract status, and book a visit or reorder supplies themselves. It cuts down the "can you just check" calls and makes renewals easier to sell.
We built exactly this kind of portal for an equipment dealer. Customers now check orders and service visits themselves instead of calling the office.
Start with the data you have
You do not need to capture everything on day one. Start by bringing the existing spreadsheet into a proper structure, clean up the duplicates and fix the serial numbers you know are wrong. Then add history and reminders as you go. The first win is simply being able to answer "what does this customer have?" in one place, and that is usually enough to make the case for the rest.
Planning work like this? Part of it may qualify for Canada's SR&ED tax credits. Here is how SR&ED applies to custom development.