Unpaid services: why lawsuits increased in 2025

2025 was the year of lawsuits: here’s why

There is a problem that every entrepreneur in the service sector is well aware of, but which often struggles to admit openly: customers dispute. And they do it more and more. In 2025, disputes between service companies – cleaning, maintenance, security, installations – and their clients reached levels that had not been seen for years. This is not a coincidence, nor is it a question of the quality of work: at the root there is something more structural, and ignoring it is expensive

According to data collected by some Italian trade associations and confirmed by European studies on the B2B sector, in 2024 at least 23% of field service companies with less than 50 employees experienced at least one formal dispute that led to a refund, a forced discount or, in the worst cases, a legal case. A figure that in 2025 is destined to grow further, also due to an increasingly challenging regulatory and contractual environment

Why are disputes on the rise: structural causes

To understand this phenomenon, it is not enough to look at the numbers: it is necessary to analyze the root causes. Three main ones emerge

1. The contracts have become more precise, but the execution has remained vague. Large companies and public administrations that contract services today demand detailed specifications, SLA defined to the minute, continuous reporting. But most of the companies that run these services still work in traditional ways: sheets of paper, phone calls, WhatsApp. The result is an ever wider gap between what the contract provides and what the company can demonstrate that it has done.

2. The culture of proof has spread among customers. Thanks to digitalization, clients are increasingly used to asking for concrete evidence. They have accustomed their software, logistics and IT vendors to providing logs, reporting, and traceability. Now they demand the same from on-site services. And when they don’t get proof, the interpretations diverge

3. SMEs do not have adequate tools to document fieldwork. It’s not that the jobs aren’t done: the problem is that they aren’t tracked in a verifiable way. A cleaner who signs a sheet of paper, a maintenance technician who sends a confirmation SMS, a security guard who writes down the time by hand: all this is worthless if it ends up in

The real cost of disputes: far beyond reimbursement

When it comes to disputes, the entrepreneur immediately thinks of the direct cost: the discount granted, the canceled invoice, the reimbursement paid. But the real costs are much higher and often hidden. There is time wasted collecting post-hoc evidence, hours of searching through sheets, emails, messages. There is a legal cost, even just for a letter from the lawyer. There is reputational damage, very difficult to quantify but devastating for companies that work

An analysis by a Milanese law firm specialized in commercial law estimated that any formal dispute – even those resolved out of court – costs the company an average of between 2,000 and 5,000 euros in direct and indirect costs. For an SME with low margins, even one dispute per year can wipe out the profit of an entire contract

The most common case: “the service did not run”

The most frequent complaint that service companies hear is not about the quality of the work, but about its execution itself. “Your operator didn’t come through.” “The cleaning on Thursday was not done.” “The technician didn’t show up.” In most cases, the work has actually been done. But without verifiable proof — geolocation, timestamp, digital signature — it’s the worker’s word against that of the customer

And in the negotiation, or worse in court, whoever has the proof wins. Those who don’t have it usually give in. Not out of weakness, but out of pragmatism: defending yourself without evidence costs more than the cause is worth

The solution is not to hire an extra lawyer

Many entrepreneurs react to these situations by strengthening the legal or commercial area. But the problem is not downstream: it is upstream. There is only one structural solution: to make every intervention automatically documentable, verifiable and unassailable. Not a signed sheet, not an email: a system that records the time of arrival, GPS position, activity carried out and time of exit, with a legally valid digital signature of the operator.

Companies that have already adopted tools of this type report a rapid transformation: disputes are halved within a few months, simply because customers know that every intervention is tracked. The deterrence works even before the test

If you want to understand how this approach works in practice, find out how GeoTapp transforms every intervention into a verifiable test. The companies that use it are no longer afraid of disputes: they close them in a few minutes, with a document that speaks