The Overdue Compliance Book
The half of the book that came due and was never booked. Four plays with real triggers, six ranking rules, and why sorting by oldest sends you to the dead sites first.
Used by
- Service Coordinator
- Account Manager
- Office Administrator
How to get this live in your business
Free. The Database Reactivation Build Standard: the objects, the checks in order, and the pass test.
Ready for
A maintenance business already owns more work than it can sell. It sits in the register as assets that came due and were never booked, sites whose agreement quietly lapsed, and buildings that changed hands without anyone updating the contact. None of it needs marketing. It needs a ranked list and somebody making calls in the right order.
In short
What this is
Database reactivation applied to a compliance register. The parent standards own the specification; this is what a maintenance book adds.
The core rule
Oldest-first feels fair and sends you to the sites least likely to answer. Rank on risk class and relationship instead.
What it does not do
It orders the work and writes the opener. Retiring a site, or deciding an obligation no longer applies, stays with a person.
The hard part
The call is easy once the list is right. The ranking and the suppression conditions are the build.
Take the spec to Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot. The sentence to paste is one click away.
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1. Read the parent standards first
Two apply. Database reactivation covers working a list you already own, and debtor chasing covers the case where the same call is also about money. If the overdue visit and an unpaid invoice belong to the same site, they are one conversation and should be one call.
2. Four plays, each with a real trigger
A play needs a trigger you can query. “Customers we have not spoken to in a while” is not a trigger, it is a mood, and a list built from it produces the call nobody wants to make.
| Play | Trigger | Why it converts |
|---|---|---|
| Due soon | Inside the window, last visit was a pass, contact is live | The cheapest work in the book. It is not overdue yet and it is about to be |
| Lapsed agreement | The agreement ended, no renewal, the site is still operating | The assets did not stop having obligations when your contract stopped |
| Changed occupancy | New tenant or new owner since the last visit | The purchase order is dead and nobody has told you. A renewal letter to the old name goes nowhere |
| Silent territory | A branch or region with assets due and no work raised this fortnight | Not a customer problem. Something has stopped, and nobody reports their own silence |
The fourth play is the one people leave out because it is not about a customer. A region with obligations falling due and no jobs raised is a signal about your own operation, and it is invisible from any report built per customer.
3. Six ranking rules
Rank is a stored value or a measure, never a sort somebody applies to a spreadsheet. The test is whether a coordinator can say why a row is at the top without opening it.
- Life-safety class before portable items. If you only get through half the list, this decides which half.
- Under agreement and paying before lapsed. A live relationship converts and a dead one is a sales call.
- Access confirmed before a site where somebody left a card last time.
- Multi-site clients before one-off sites. One conversation moves many obligations.
- An open defect before a clean annual. A known fault outranks a routine visit.
- Last human contact longer ago than your own threshold, so the list does not keep calling the same people.
Age belongs in the model as an input, not as the sort. The reason is simple: the oldest overdue items are disproportionately sites that have changed hands, closed, or already moved to somebody else. Sorting by age means the first hour of every session is spent confirming that.
4. The opener
The call has an advantage almost no other outbound call has: there is a specific fact about the person’s own building that they probably do not know and would want to. Lead with it.
Works. Name the asset, the address, the date it came due, and the standard that says so. Then offer a window. It is specific, checkable, and about them.
Does not work. “Just checking whether you want to renew.” It asks them to do the work of remembering what they had, and it invites a no that costs nothing to give.
Be careful with the fact you lead with. Stating that an asset is overdue for a test is a statement about your records. Stating that a building is non-compliant is a determination, and it is not yours to make on a first call.
5. Suppression, checked at the contact step
Some rows must not be contacted regardless of how well they rank, and the check belongs at the moment of contact rather than in the view somebody built the list from. A filter is per person and per session. A gate is not.
- Anyone who has asked not to be contacted, on any channel, ever.
- A site with an active dispute or an insurance claim in progress.
- A site already contacted inside your own cooling-off window, so two plays cannot both fire at it.
- A site where the relationship is with a managing agent rather than the occupier, and the agent is the correct contact.
6. The number that tells you it is working
Not calls made, and not conversion. The number is the share of ranked work that received a job or a logged contact inside the window. Ranking that nobody works is a report, and a book that is ranked weekly and worked never looks identical on a dashboard to one that is working.
Track it per branch or region alongside the silent-territory play. The two together answer a question most operators cannot answer today: is this region quiet because the book is empty, or because nobody is working it.
Related reading
The ranking is yours. Two of the calls can be ours.
Nothing ready-made works a compliance book: the method above is the whole of it. Two calls around it are already built. Booked After Hours answers your number out of hours and writes the job into ServiceM8 or Simpro, $119 a month. Get Paid rings the overdue invoice on the same site against your live Xero ledger, $199 a month. Flat, no call caps.
Technical? The build standard is open. Take it.