Keep the history of every unit you service
The furnace in the attic, the water heater in the garage, the panel by the back door. Record what's installed at an address and every job and visit that names it builds up a history: this unit, this serial, serviced these dates.
Why record the unit and not just the address
The thing you service outlives the job. A customer calls four years after you put a furnace in and asks what you fitted, whether it's still covered, and what you did last time. If all you have is a list of jobs at that address, you're reading old invoices trying to work out which of the two units they mean.
Writing the unit down once turns that into a page you open. It also means the next person who goes out knows the model before they get in the truck, which is the difference between one visit and two.
Adding a unit
Units live at an address, so you add them from a property's page. Open the address and use Add a unit in the Equipment section.
Name it
Whatever you call it on site is right: "Upstairs furnace", "Main panel", "Unit 2 condenser". That's the only thing the form actually needs.
Fill in the rest when you're standing in front of it
Make, model, serial number, where in the building it is. Nobody has this to hand when they're setting up an account, and a form that demands it is a form you skip. Come back and add it the next time you have the panel open.
Put in the warranty date if you know it
This is the one worth the extra ten seconds. A warranty running out is the most reliable reason you have to call a past customer without it sounding like a sales call.
Building the history
The service history on a unit's page isn't something you fill in. It's every job and every visit that named that unit, newest first, with what happened on each.
So the habit that matters is picking the unit when you book the work. Both the New job form and the visit form show a Which unit? dropdown as soon as you've chosen the address. Leave it blank when the work isn't about one particular thing; pick it when it is.
The dropdown only offers units at the address you picked, and only ones still in service. That's on purpose: a job at one house can't be about a furnace at another, and you can read the history of a boiler you took out but you can't book new work on it.
When a unit gets replaced
Use Replaced rather than deleting it. The unit stops appearing when you pick a unit for a job, and everything you ever did to it stays readable on its page. That record is usually the reason to keep it: "there used to be a Rheem here, we swapped it in 2023" is the answer to a question somebody will ask.
Delete is there too, tucked under the confirm box, for the row you typed twice. Past jobs and visits keep their own record either way; they just stop naming a unit.
Deleting the address deletes the units at it. The jobs and invoices stay; the kit doesn't. The confirm box says how many are about to go.
Where you'll see it
| Where | What you see |
|---|---|
| A property's page | Every unit at that address, with its make and model, where it is in the building, and how its warranty stands. Replaced units sit at the bottom. |
| A unit's own page | The full detail, plus the service history: every job and visit that named it |
| The New job form | A Which unit? dropdown, once you've picked an address |
| The visit form | The same dropdown, on a customer's Schedule tab |
Equipment appears wherever Properties do: roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, general contracting, painting, solar and real estate. On a sales or recruiting pipeline there's no job site, so there's nothing to install anything at.
Asking your assistant instead
If you've connected RadiusOS to Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, the same information is there without opening the app. list-equipment and get-equipment answer "what's installed at 12 Maple", "what did we do to that furnace last time", and "whose warranty runs out in the next couple of months".
That last one is the useful one on a slow week. See the AI assistant connection article for setup.
Plans
Equipment is on every plan, including Free, with no limit on how many units you record. The reason a customer calls you back rather than someone else shouldn't sit behind an upgrade.