Case Study · Schools & Universities
One HVAC contract, and an invoice nobody checks against it
A university campus runs HVAC across dozens of buildings under one or two service contracts, each with its own preventive-maintenance schedule and its own included-services terms. The invoice gets approved against a budget line, not against what the contract actually promises. A preventive visit rebilled as an emergency callout, or a rate charged above the negotiated schedule, is easy to miss when nobody is comparing the two.
The problem
Campus facilities run HVAC across buildings built and renovated on different cycles, under service contracts that bundle many buildings into one PM schedule and one blanket price. The terms live in a PDF that facilities holds and the business office rarely opens, so a preventive visit gets rebilled as an extra callout, or a repair is billed at a rate above what the contract's schedule sets, and the invoice is still approved because it is checked against last month's total, not the contract.
Missed intervals still cost coverage: a preventive visit skipped to save a line item can quietly void the warranty on a newer air handler, and service contractors report their own response times with nobody reconciling them against what the contract promises.
What Canary changes
Canary reads the HVAC service contract once, extracts what it includes and its rate schedule, and checks every invoice line against them: a preventive visit billed as an extra callout, or a rate above the negotiated schedule, gets flagged before the payment run, clause cited.
The same reading tracks the PM schedule that keeps each unit's warranty valid and contractor response times against the SLA, so a missed interval or a slow response surfaces before the unit fails, not after.