Multi-year programs — plan a big site over several years
Some clients can't, or won't, repaint a whole site in one go. A retirement village with 72 villas, a unit complex, a school or a strata block usually has a yearly budget, a committee or board that approves it, and residents who need the work spread out. A multi-year program turns that kind of site into one agreed project: you measure every building once, put the buildings into years, add touch-up days each year so nothing already painted is left to slide, and send it to the client as a single program they accept.
For you it is steady, booked work for years at a time, priced from measurements you already took. For the client it is a predictable yearly cost and a property that never looks neglected.
When to use one
- Lots of similar buildings: villas, townhouses, blocks of units, school buildings.
- A client who budgets by the year: a body corporate, strata or owners' corporation, a village operator, an HOA or condo board.
- A site that is too big, or too occupied, to paint at once.
A one-building job is never a program, and nothing about your ordinary jobs changes. The option only appears when there is more than one building to spread out.
Where to find it
- Measure the site as you normally would, one building at a time.
- From the project, tap Price quote. When two or more buildings are measured, Surfacely asks which buildings the estimate is for.
- Below the list of buildings is the card Plan this over several years →. Tap it.
Surfacely prices the whole site from your measurements as an ordinary estimate, then opens the program planner instead of the estimate editor. Every building keeps its measured price, whichever year you put it in.
What you set in the planner
- Term: 5 years by default, anything from 2 to 10.
- Which buildings go in which year: spread evenly, worst condition first, and you can move any building.
- Touch-up days each year, in whole crew days.
- Building washes, if you want them, every few years.
- The yearly price adjustment: the Consumer Price Index for your market by default.
A live year-by-year table shows each year's repaint, touch-up days, any wash and the year's total as you go. See Planning a multi-year program for each step.
What the client gets
Create a proposal from the job as normal. It gains a Your Program section with the year-by-year table, why the buildings are in that order, what touch-up days cover, how the yearly price adjustment works, how they pay, and how they can end the program. It is written as an agreed multi-year project, never as a string of separate quotes. When you send the proposal, the program is fixed in it, so changing your plan later never changes a document your client has already seen.
How it gets paid
Each year is its own phase. When the client accepts, the deposit is worked out on the first year, not the whole site, so you are always ahead of the spend without asking a committee for a deposit on six years of work. Each later year takes its own deposit when it starts, and each year is invoiced as its work is done.
Finding a program again
Every program has its own page with a timeline of years 1 to N. Open it from the client's page or from the job the site was measured on. From there, Change the plan takes you back to the planner.