Short answer

Set the routine's due date to the first occurrence of the season and its recurrence end date to the end of the season, then tick the Repeat every year checkbox. There is no start date — the due date is where the cycle begins. The recurrence ignores the year and repeats the same window every year — so an April-to-September weekly cut (due date 1 April, recurrence end date 16 September) picks itself up again next April automatically.

Detail

This is how to model contract terms like:

  • "Football pitches — cut grass/strim — Monthly (Nov–Mar)"
  • "Trees & shrubs — Bi-annually (outside nesting season)"
  • "Wildflower areas — seasonal cut-back"

The mechanism:

  1. Create the routine, pick the assets, pick the frequency (e.g. Weekly), pick the type (Job).
  2. Set the due date to the first occurrence of the season (e.g. 1 April 2026). There is no start date — the due date is where the cycle begins.
  3. Set the recurrence end date to the last occurrence of the same season (e.g. 16 September 2026).
  4. Tick Repeat every year.

The recurrence engine treats the due date and recurrence end date as the window, ignores the year, and re-applies the same window every subsequent year. So you set it up once for season 1 and it runs forever after.

What you should not do:

  • Don't model it as "monthly all year" and rely on someone manually skipping the summer occurrences. They will forget.
  • Don't model each year as a separate fixed-window routine. You'll end up with 3 routines for a 3-year contract, and re-creating them each year is wasted effort.

Watch-outs

  • The "Repeat every year" checkbox only makes sense in combination with a due date and a recurrence end date. Without an end date, the routine runs continuously regardless of the season.
  • For bi-annual work that should fall outside specific months (e.g. "outside nesting season"), define the window explicitly as the months you do want the work to run, not the months you don't.
  • Sanity-check the cadence against the season. Grounds work usually gets more frequent in spring/summer and less frequent over winter — so if your summer window has come out as the lower-frequency one, it's almost certainly loaded backwards. (A common slip: modelling summer pitch-cutting as Bi-monthly, which is every two months — a reduction — when the contract means a fortnightly summer cut dropping to monthly in winter. See the fortnightly-recurrence Q&A.)