This page is written for the person who owns the schedule for a commercial building's heating, ventilation and cooling: a facilities manager, a building engineer, an owner with a few units. It is about planning the work rather than performing it, and it does not recommend a contractor or specify what any given unit needs. Those belong to whoever is competent for the equipment. What is genuinely a planning question is how the year is laid out, what the plan costs, and what the record has to hold.
The year, laid out backwards from the seasons
Cooling serviced before the first hot week, heating before the first cold one, with enough lead time that anything found can be fixed before the season arrives. Filters usually sit on their own shorter cycle driven by the environment rather than the calendar. Laying the year out this way is what turns a unit list into a plan, and it is the part that survives whoever set it up leaving.
The unit list is the plan, and it is usually incomplete
Most buildings discover during a first proper plan that they have units nobody was maintaining: a small split serving a comms room, a unit on a roof nobody visits, something serving a tenant area. Walking the building against the list is unglamorous and it is where the real gaps are found, far more often than in the intervals.
What the plan costs, and what it is worth arguing about
Costing the plan from your own unit count, visits a year, visit length and rate turns a proposal into a number that can be discussed rather than a request that can be refused. What it should not do is claim a saving: what unplanned failures cost you is your own figure, and putting the two side by side without asserting a relationship between them is the honest presentation.
Questions people ask about commercial hvac preventive maintenance
How often should commercial HVAC be serviced?
It depends on the equipment, its duty and its environment, and it is a question for the manufacturer's guidance and your own competent engineer. The schedule's job is to make whatever interval you set happen reliably.
Should we use a contractor or in-house staff?
Both work, and the programme is identical either way: the interval is a contractor visit rather than your labour. What changes is that you must insist on getting the report, because a contracted visit with no record leaves the next one starting from nothing.
Does this site recommend HVAC contractors?
No. This is maintenance planning software; finding somebody to do the work is a different business and deliberately not one we are in.