Nobody decided to stop billing. That is exactly why it stopped.

A maintenance agreement fails the way a gutter fails: not on a date, but gradually, invisibly, and always while attention is somewhere else. A technician completes the third quarterly visit and the paperwork rides in a truck for a week. A renewal date passes during the busy season. A three percent escalator, negotiated hard two years ago, never makes it from the contract to the invoice template. No one of these is a decision. Together they are a discount program nobody approved.

The industry answer is software: another system for the office to feed, with dashboards the busy season ignores at precisely the moment they matter. Our answer is a reading. Lapsed takes the whole agreement book, the tech logs and two years of invoices, and matches them line against line. Where a contracted deliverable has no matching invoice, that gap becomes a document: a drafted invoice for the unbilled visit, a renewal letter carrying the forgotten escalator, a one-page account note where the contract itself has drifted from what the crews actually do.

You approve each document or you strike it. Nothing reaches a customer without your signature, because a recovered dollar that costs a relationship is not recovered. What remains at the end is not a dashboard but a ledger: what lapsed, what came back, and the standing monthly reading that keeps the middle of the book from going quiet again.