A comprehensive maintenance contract bundles spare parts into the maintenance fee instead of billing them as they occur. That single difference changes the pricing, the paperwork and the amount of risk the dealer takes on.
CMC stands for Comprehensive Maintenance Contract. It is a maintenance agreement in which the agreed spare parts are included in the fee, so when a board or a sensor fails the customer pays nothing extra. The dealer absorbs the cost of the part from the contract value.
Everything else looks like an annual maintenance contract: a fixed period, scheduled preventive visits and a response commitment for breakdowns. The difference is who pays when something expensive fails, and that difference is the reason a comprehensive contract costs the customer considerably more.
The word comprehensive does the dealer no favours in a dispute. Nothing is genuinely all-inclusive, so the exclusion list is the most important page of the agreement.
A contract record in your system should carry these inclusions and exclusions as fields the service desk can read at call intake. If the exclusion only exists in a signed copy in a cupboard, the engineer in the field will make the decision for you.
There is no published rate. The fee is an estimate of what the machine will cost you to keep running, plus a margin for being wrong.
The inputs a careful dealer uses are all things a service system already records:
Because this pricing is a forecast of your own failure history, a dealership that cannot report service history per serial number is guessing. That is the practical argument for keeping an asset register and job card history in one system rather than in an engineer's notebook.
Contract profitability is also worth tracking after the fact. Comparing what you invoiced for a contract against the parts and visits consumed under it is how you find out which models should never be offered comprehensively.
| Warranty | AMC | CMC | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who pays | Built into the sale price | Customer pays a yearly fee | Customer pays a higher yearly fee |
| Labour and visits | Included | Included | Included |
| Spare parts | Included for defects | Quoted and billed separately | Included, within the named list |
| Preventive visits | Sometimes, often not | A stated number | A stated number |
| Who carries the risk | The manufacturer | Shared: the customer pays for parts | The dealer |
| Starts | At installation | When warranty ends | When warranty ends, or later |
Read the full decision in AMC vs CMC, and the contract mechanics in what is AMC software. Aura Business keeps warranty tracking, annual contracts and comprehensive contracts as distinct record types on the same machine, so the service desk always knows which one applies today.
Comprehensive Maintenance Contract. It is a maintenance agreement in which agreed spare parts are included in the fee, in addition to the labour, visits and breakdown response that any maintenance contract covers.
It is more predictable for the customer, because one known fee replaces an unknown parts bill. Whether it is better value depends on how reliable the machine is. For the dealer, it is the riskier of the two and should be priced from real failure history.
No. Consumables, wear items and specific high-value assemblies are normally excluded by name, along with damage from misuse or power problems. Write the exclusions into the contract record so the service desk sees them when a call arrives.
When the machine is old and its failure history is unknown, when the site has poor power or handling, or when the critical assembly is one you cannot source quickly. It is fair to offer an annual contract with parts billed separately instead.
The contract fee is a supply of services and is invoiced accordingly. The treatment of parts supplied under the contract should be confirmed with your own tax adviser, since it depends on how the agreement is drafted.
Record every visit and every part issued against the contract, not just against the customer. The contract then shows the invoiced value on one side and the parts and labour consumed on the other, which tells you whether that model should be offered comprehensively again.
Tell us how your centre or business works today and we will tell you plainly which parts of this apply to you, and which do not.
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