HVAC software in Australia: refrigerant records, plant registers and maintenance contracts

What does an HVAC business track that other trades don’t?

Three things: refrigerant, plant and contracts. A plumber or electrician mostly tracks jobs. An HVAC and refrigeration contractor also tracks a controlled substance that it buys, stores, charges and recovers under federal regulation; a register of plant that it services for years; and maintenance contracts that define what must happen to each piece of plant, and when.

That makes the asset the centre of the system. A rooftop package unit at a shopping centre has a refrigerant type and charge, a service history, a contract scope, a warranty and a replacement date. Jobs come and go; the asset stays. Software that hangs everything off jobs will always struggle with commercial HVAC.

What refrigerant records does the law require?

Technicians need a licence, the business needs an authorisation, and the authorisation comes with quarterly records. The Australian Refrigeration Council (ARC) administers both on behalf of the Australian Government under the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas Management Regulations 1995.

ARC states that anyone carrying out work on refrigeration and air conditioning equipment that risks emitting fluorocarbon refrigerant, including installing, commissioning, servicing, maintaining or decommissioning it, needs a refrigerant handling licence. Any individual or business buying, storing or selling fluorocarbon refrigerant needs a refrigerant trading authorisation (RTA).

The RTA conditions, reproduced by ARC from regulation 141, set out what your records must hold:

Record	What the conditions require	What software should capture
Refrigerant bought, recovered, sold and disposed of	Up to date records for each quarter	Purchases from supplier invoices; recovery and charge per job, per asset
Purchase details	Date, supplier, refrigerant type and quantity; supplier invoices or activity lists can’t be substituted	Structured purchase entries, not attached PDFs
Cylinder leak checks	Containers in your possession checked for leaks at least every quarter, with cylinder test dates recorded	Cylinder register with check and test due dates
Equipment	Leak detectors, vacuum pumps and recovery units maintained and operating correctly	Tool register with maintenance history
Licensees	Name and licence number of each licensee handling your refrigerant	Technician profiles with licence expiry alerts
Risk management plan	A plan for handling and storage, put into effect	Stored plan and review date
Production on request	Copies sent within 14 days of a written request	One click quarterly report

ARC offers templates and says you don’t have to use them, but you must keep the records quarterly. In practice, most businesses rebuild them every quarter from invoices and job notes. If each service job already records refrigerant type and kilograms recovered or charged against the asset, the quarterly records become a report rather than a project.

How should planned maintenance and asset registers work?

A planned preventive maintenance (PPM) contract is a schedule of tasks per asset per frequency, and the software’s job is to generate those visits, record what was done and show the client what is due. The design questions to settle early:

1. Asset hierarchy. Site, building, plant room, asset, component. Clients with portfolios want to see all of it; technicians want only what is in front of them.
2. Task libraries. Monthly, quarterly and annual task lists per asset type, reused across contracts and edited in one place.
3. Visit generation. Grouping tasks that fall due together at one site into a single visit, so you don’t send three technicians in one week.
4. Evidence. Readings, photos and refrigerant entries captured on the asset during the visit, offline if the plant room has no signal.
5. Defects to quotes. A defect found on a PPM visit should become a quote the client can approve, without the technician writing it up twice.
6. Client reporting. A monthly report per site, and a portfolio view for facilities managers.

simPRO sells a Maintenance Planner add-on for preventative maintenance of customer assets, and AroFlo lists an assets module, a maintenance work type and HVAC among its industries, so check whether either already covers your contracts before you build. Custom work tends to pay where contracts are complex, sites number in the hundreds, or clients demand reporting in their own format.

What do cooling towers add?

Cooling towers bring state public health law into the contract, with fixed testing, audit and notification cycles. In NSW, the occupier must manage cooling water systems under the Public Health Act 2010, the Public Health Regulation 2022 and AS/NZS 3666:2011, and NSW Health lists six safeguards.

Requirement (NSW)	Frequency or deadline
Risk assessment and risk management plan (Approved Form 1)	Every 5 years, or more often if required
Independent audit of compliance	Annually
Certificates of plan and audit completion to the local council	Within 7 days
Sampling for Legionella and heterotrophic colony count	Monthly
Reportable results (Legionella at or above 1,000 cfu/mL, or HCC at or above 5,000,000 cfu/mL) notified to council	Within 24 hours of the lab result
Unique identification number displayed on each tower	Sign within 30 days of issue

The occupier carries the legal duty but can engage contractors as the duly qualified person for routine management and as the competent person for the risk management plan; it can’t audit its own system. For an HVAC contractor, the software needs to know which role you hold on each site, schedule the monthly sampling, track lab results, and raise an alarm the moment a reportable result arrives, because the 24 hour clock starts then. Other states have their own cooling tower rules, so a national contractor needs these as configurable schedules per state.

Why do field service tools struggle with asset history?

Most field service tools were built for jobs first and added assets later, so history lives in job notes rather than on the asset. That shows up when a client asks how much refrigerant a chiller has lost in three years, which units are on the oldest refrigerant, or what you did to an air handler last spring. If the answer requires reading old job cards, the data model is the problem.

Before building anything, try those three questions in your current platform. If it answers them, you need configuration and training, not software. If it can’t, an asset and refrigerant layer that syncs jobs from your platform’s API, adds the asset data model and writes results back is usually cheaper than migrating. That is a data engineering problem as much as an app problem.

Can BMS alarms turn into jobs?

Yes, and it is the most direct way to move from reactive callouts to faster, cheaper fixes. A building management system already knows when a supply air temperature drifts or a compressor trips. The usual flow:

1. The BMS or its monitoring layer sends alarms out by email, webhook or API.
2. A small integration service filters nuisance alarms and duplicates.
3. It matches the alarm to your asset record and the client’s contract.
4. It opens a job in your field service platform with priority and the alarm data attached.
5. It notifies the on call technician, and closes the loop when the alarm clears.

The engineering effort is mostly in step 2 and 3: mapping BMS point names to your assets, and setting rules so technicians trust the alerts. Our API development service covers this kind of integration, and the API integration cost guide explains the pricing drivers.

Typical builds and indicative costs

These builds sit beside your platform, not instead of it. Figures are indicative AUD market ranges, ex GST, not quotes. They fall within the bands Expeed publishes for Australian custom software: $15,000 to $40,000 for simple internal tools and $40,000 to $150,000 for mid complexity systems.

Build	Includes	Indicative range
Asset register and PPM scheduler	Site and asset hierarchy, task libraries, visit generation, offline capture, client portfolio reporting	$30,000 to $80,000
Refrigerant usage log and reports	Per asset recovery and charge capture, cylinder and tool registers, licence expiry alerts, quarterly RTA records	$15,000 to $35,000
BMS alert to job integration	Alarm intake, filtering rules, asset matching, job creation in your platform, on call notification	$20,000 to $50,000

Expeed puts annual maintenance at 15% to 20% of the build. Cost rises with the number of BMS vendors, the quality of your platform’s API and how clean your existing asset data is.

How AWLabs would approach an HVAC build

We start with a Development Consult about your contracts, your refrigerant records and the questions your platform can’t answer. If custom work is worth it, a paid Discovery Audit looks at your platform’s API, a sample of asset data and any BMS feeds, then you get a fixed price Schedule of Work with three options: The Minimum, The Recommended and The Complete. Senior engineers lead every build, and updates arrive every Tuesday and Friday, Sydney time.

We haven’t yet delivered an HVAC project, and we’ll say so if better configuration of your platform solves the problem. For the fire side of building services, see our fire protection software page; for platform choice, the trades software comparison. More on our construction and trades work. This is general information, not legal advice.