Service level agreement (SLA)
A service level agreement (SLA) is the contractual commitment between a contractor and a customer that defines how fast service work will be acknowledged, responded to, and resolved — typically written into a commercial service or maintenance agreement as the performance standard the shop is measured against.
The parts.
- Response windowHow fast the shop must acknowledge and respond — often 4 hours for an emergency call, per agreement tier.
- Resolution windowHow long the shop has to resolve the issue once on site, written into the contract.
- Tied toSLA compliance rate, which measures how often the commitments are actually met.
What to know.
What a service level agreement typically covers
Most SLAs define two windows: a response window — how quickly a request must be acknowledged or a technician dispatched, often four hours for an emergency tier — and a resolution window — how long the shop has to resolve the issue once it's addressed, sometimes written as a clock from when the job is assigned. Agreement-tiered books layer these per customer, so a multi-site account can carry the same SLA across every location. An SLA is a commitment about performance; the broader service agreement is the contract that carries the scope, pricing, and PM schedule.
Why SLAs matter for commercial contractors
An SLA is the enforceable half of a service agreement — the reason a customer pays a premium and the ground on which they hold you to account. Missed windows can carry credits or penalties written into the contract, and a pattern of misses is one of the fastest ways to lose a renewal, since the customer's facilities team is tracking compliance against the same document you signed. For multi-site accounts, SLAs turn individual visit performance into a portfolio problem: one site's miss is a breach against the whole account.
What makes an SLA achievable
The three ingredients are realistic windows sized to your actual response capacity, a defined route for emergency-tier work including after-hours on-call coverage, and visibility into compliance before the window closes rather than after. An SLA that dispatch can't see is an SLA that gets missed — if the dispatcher doesn't know a job is covered by a four-hour response commitment, the clock runs out before anyone reacts.
How Thermal tracks SLA compliance automatically
Thermal ties the SLA's response and resolution windows to the agreement and carries them onto every work order that agreement generates, so the job knows its clock from creation. Status timestamps compare against those windows automatically, and the dispatch board flags at-risk visits before the window closes instead of discovering the breach after the customer calls. Compliance rate rolls up per agreement, per customer, and per branch from the same data.
Questions attached to this term.
What's the difference between an SLA and a service agreement?
The SLA is the performance commitments — response and resolution windows. The service agreement is the broader contract that carries scope, covered equipment, PM schedule, pricing, and the SLA terms together. An SLA can also sit inside a single contract.
What response time should an SLA promise?
It depends on the tier — emergency response in four hours and routine work within a day or two are common structures, but the right number is sized to your actual dispatch capacity, since an over-promised window is a guaranteed breach.
What happens when an SLA is missed?
Whatever the contract says — typically a credit or penalty on the invoice, and always a mark against renewal. A contractor that misses often is negotiating the next agreement from a weaker position.
Can different customers have different SLAs?
Yes — SLA tiers are usually set per agreement or per customer, which is why the windows have to travel with the work order rather than being a company-wide standard.
These numbers, on your own book.
If you want to see them calculated from real work orders and agreements rather than a spreadsheet, that's a demo.