Recurring monthly revenue (RMR) is the contracted, repeating monthly income a contractor earns from a customer relationship that continues after the original installation is paid for. It is the monitoring fee on a fire-alarm panel, the managed-services line on a network closet, the quarterly inspection amortized to a monthly figure, the cloud-storage subscription on a camera system, the maintenance agreement on a rooftop unit. It is the money that arrives whether or not a truck rolls that month.
RMR is distinct from the install. The install is a one-time number — you bid it, you build it, you invoice it, it's gone. RMR is the annuity that the install creates. A $40,000 access-control and fire job that closes with a $350-per-month monitoring and service agreement didn't just book $40,000 of project revenue; it booked $4,200 a year of RMR that compounds across the life of the account. For commercial installation contractors in security, fire, AV, and low-voltage especially, the RMR base is the difference between a business that is worth a multiple of its profit and a business that is worth a fraction of last year's revenue.
The honest version: most contractors who carry RMR track it badly. The monitoring contracts live in one system, the install jobs live in another, the actual invoicing lives in a third, and nobody can produce a clean, auditable RMR roll-up on demand. That gap is not a vanity problem. It is the single thing a buyer, a lender, or a partner looks at first — and the number you can't defend is the number you don't get paid for.
What actually counts as RMR
The strict definition matters because RMR is the input to enterprise value, and inflating it is the fastest way to blow up a deal in diligence. RMR is income that is (1) contracted, (2) recurring on a fixed monthly or normalized-to-monthly cadence, and (3) durable — meaning it persists without a new sale. Central-station alarm monitoring is the textbook case. So are managed-access-control fees, video-surveillance-as-a-service subscriptions, recurring inspection-and-test agreements (NFPA 72 fire-alarm testing, sprinkler ITM), networked AV support contracts, and HVAC or solar service-and-monitoring plans billed on a schedule.
What is not RMR: time-and-materials service calls, warranty work, one-time commissioning, and project change-orders. Those are real revenue — often good revenue — but they are not contracted to recur, so they don't earn the multiple. A quarterly inspection contract billed at $1,200 a year is RMR (normalize it: $100/month). The emergency service call you ran last Tuesday is not. The discipline is in keeping the two apart in your books so the RMR figure you report is the RMR figure a buyer can verify.
Why RMR sets the value of the company
Security and fire-alarm companies — and increasingly AV, low-voltage, and managed-service contractors — are valued on an RMR multiple. A buyer pays some number of times the monthly recurring revenue for the contracted book, then values the install and service business separately (or rolls it in at a lower multiple). The exact multiple moves with account quality, contract terms, attrition, and the rate environment, and it is not our place to quote a figure as if it were fixed — it isn't. But the structural fact holds across the industry: a clean, low-attrition, well-documented RMR base is worth far more per dollar than the same dollar of project revenue, because it's predictable.
This is why a contractor with $2M in install revenue and no RMR can be worth less than a contractor with $1.2M in install revenue and a healthy monitored book. The first company has to re-win its revenue every January. The second one starts the year with money already on the books. Predictability is the entire premise of the RMR multiple, and predictability is a function of how well you actually measure and defend the number.
There's an honest caveat operators should hear: chasing RMR for the multiple alone is how contractors end up with a book full of low-margin, high-churn accounts that look good on a spreadsheet and bleed in real life. RMR is valuable when it's profitable and durable. The number to manage is not gross RMR — it's net RMR after attrition and after the cost to serve. A buyer's diligence team knows this. So should you, long before they show up.
Attrition: the number under the number
RMR is never a static figure because accounts cancel. Attrition — the rate at which RMR walks out the door — is the metric that determines whether your book is appreciating or quietly melting. Gross RMR added in a year means little if attrition erased most of it. Net RMR growth (new RMR booked minus RMR lost to cancellation, non-payment, and downgrade) is the figure that actually tells you whether the annuity is healthy.
Attrition has texture that a single percentage hides. Voluntary cancellation (the customer left), involuntary attrition (non-payment, business closure), and downgrade (the account stayed but dropped a service line) are different problems with different fixes, and a contractor who only sees a blended churn number can't act on any of them. The companies that win on RMR are the ones who can see attrition by account, by vertical, by contract vintage, and by reason — and who catch a slipping account while it's still a phone call away from being saved, not after the cancellation hits the ledger.
This is precisely where disconnected systems fail contractors. When the monitoring contract, the billing record, and the customer relationship live in three different tools, attrition is something you discover at month-end instead of something you manage in real time. By the time the report runs, the account is already gone.
How RMR is calculated and tracked
At its simplest, RMR is the sum of every active account's normalized monthly contracted fee. Annualize it and you get ARR-equivalent figures the industry sometimes calls RAR (recurring annual revenue). Subtract the cost to serve and you get the margin on the book. Track the month-over-month delta — new accounts, upgrades, downgrades, cancellations — and you get the net RMR movement that tells you whether you're building an asset or running in place.
The mechanics aren't hard. The bookkeeping discipline is. RMR tracking falls apart when contract terms aren't captured at the point of sale, when escalator clauses (the annual price step-up baked into a multi-year monitoring agreement) aren't applied automatically, when a downgrade gets logged as a note in someone's inbox instead of as a change to the ledger, and when nobody reconciles contracted RMR against actually-invoiced RMR to catch the accounts that are on the books but not being billed. Every one of those gaps is money — and every one of them is a finding waiting to happen in a diligence review.
How Forge handles RMR
Forge is the operating system for commercial installation contractors — one AI-native platform that replaces the disconnected stack of estimating, scheduling, CRM, documents, payroll, communication, and field ops. RMR isn't bolted onto that as a separate subscription tool; it lives where the rest of the money lives, inside Treasury, the payroll-and-financials drawer of the chest. Treasury carries a native RMR ledger alongside payroll, certified-payroll compliance, and change-orders, so contracted recurring revenue is tracked against the same project, the same customer, and the same labor record that produced it.
Because Forge is one system rather than a federation of integrations, the install job and the recurring agreement it creates aren't strangers to each other. The $40,000 fire-and-access job and the $350-per-month monitoring contract it spun off are the same account in the same chest — which means the RMR ledger reflects the real relationship, not a re-keyed copy of it in a standalone billing app. That's the federation principle: the modules share architecture, so the RMR figure is grounded in the actual contracted work rather than reconciled across tools after the fact.
This matters most in the verticals where RMR is the whole game. Security and fire-alarm contractors carry the heaviest recurring book of any commercial trade — central-station monitoring, NFPA 72 inspection-and-test agreements, managed access control — and those are active, shipping verticals in Forge today. AV and low-voltage are too, where networked support and surveillance-as-a-service increasingly drive the recurring line. Solar, HVAC, and electrical are active verticals as well, and Treasury's RMR ledger carries their service-and-monitoring plans on the same footing — the same normalized cadence, the same tie back to the originating job.
A plain note on scope, because we'd rather be precise than impressive: Forge tracks, normalizes, escalates, and reconciles RMR inside Treasury, and ties it to the originating job. It is your ledger and your single source of truth for the recurring book — not a central station, not a monitoring receiver, and not a substitute for the alarm-monitoring platform itself. What it replaces is the spreadsheet-and-three-systems sprawl that makes RMR impossible to defend. The number stops being something you reconstruct at month-end and starts being something you can produce, audited and current, the moment a buyer, a lender, or your own forecast asks for it.
The bottom line for operators
RMR is the most valuable revenue a commercial contractor can earn and the most commonly mismeasured. The install pays this year's bills; the RMR book is what your company is actually worth. If you can't produce a clean, attrition-adjusted, contract-backed RMR figure on demand, you are leaving enterprise value on the table — not because the revenue isn't real, but because you can't prove it is.
The fix is not another standalone subscription-billing tool sitting next to your CRM and your accounting package, creating a fourth place for the number to drift. The fix is keeping RMR in the same system as the work that creates it, where it's tied to the job, escalated on schedule, reconciled against what's actually invoiced, and ready to defend. That's the bet Forge makes: the recurring book belongs in the chest with everything else, because the moment it's a separate system, it's a separate version of the truth — and the version you can't defend is the one that costs you at the table.