Maintenance and facilities

The visit that was due and did not happen

Almost every business in this trade has recurring work: an annual service, a quarterly inspection, a monthly clean. Almost all of it is tracked on a wall planner or in someone's head, and a predictable proportion is missed every year.

Missed recurring work is worse than a lost quote, because the client was already yours. Somebody who would have said yes was never asked, they frequently assume you have stopped offering it, and the following year they ring someone else. It is the quietest way to lose revenue that exists in this trade, because nothing happens at the moment it goes wrong.

A task against the site with a date, appearing in a daily view before it falls due, is the entire fix. It is not sophisticated and for a business of this size it is probably worth more than everything else on this page put together.

The history that lives in the van

What was done at that site, which valve is awkward, where the key is kept, which contact actually answers, what the boiler is and when it was last attended. In most maintenance businesses that is held by the engineer who usually goes.

It works well until they are away, and it stops existing when they leave. Then someone else attends, does not know the access arrangements, cannot find the isolation valve and has to ring the office, and the client observes all of it.

A site record with the history of every visit, and two or three custom fields carrying what somebody needs on the doorstep, moves that knowledge from a person to the business.

The contract no one diarised

A maintenance contract that lapses because the renewal date was in one person's calendar is the most expensive kind of forgetting in this trade. The work was recurring, the client was satisfied, and it stopped for an administrative reason.

A renewal date with a notice period, held as a task well before both, is the answer. The conversation happens while the client is still happy rather than after they have started looking.

Not field service software

No dispatch board. No route optimisation. No engineer mobile application with an offline mode. No live tracking. No parts, stock or van inventory. No job sheet or certificate generation.

If scheduling six vans efficiently is the core of your problem, a field service product is the right purchase and this is not it. We would rather lose the enquiry here than at the end of a trial.

The mobile limitation, stated plainly

The product works on a phone as a web application. There is no native application and no offline mode. If your engineers regularly work in plant rooms and basements without signal, that is a genuine limitation rather than a detail, and it is one worth testing before you commit.

What businesses use it for alongside those

The client relationship and the commitments. Who the client is, who is on site, what has happened there, when the next visit is due and when the contract renews. Field service products are organised around jobs and handle those poorly, which is why they usually end up on a wall planner beside the software.

Planned maintenance is a schedule to you and a dated task to the software

You say planned preventative maintenance, or a schedule, or a frequency. The product says a task against a record with a due date on it. Almost nothing is lost in that translation, but one thing is, and it is the thing that catches people.

A schedule is a rule. It says the fire alarm is quarterly and the water temperatures are monthly, for as long as the contract runs. A task is an instance. It says this site, this service, this date. The product holds instances and does not hold the rule, which is why the habit of entering the next occurrence as soon as the last one is closed matters so much in this trade and matters hardly at all in others.

The rule still has somewhere to live. The contract schedule is a document, and a document belongs as a file on the site, where whoever is arguing about scope in eighteen months can read what was actually agreed rather than what everyone has since assumed.

Reactive is a matter, and the distinction is who decided it was needed

Planned work is work you agreed to a year ago. Reactive work is work a tenant decided on this morning. Your trade calls it a call, a job, a works order or a ticket depending on who trained your office manager. On the plans carrying service it is a matter, with a target counted in your working hours.

The judgement worth making early is not to model planned visits as matters simply because it would produce one tidy list. A response target measured against a visit you scheduled yourself twelve months ago means nothing, and once meaningless numbers are in the same list as real ones, the real ones stop being defensible.

A remedial is a new thing, not the old visit left open

An engineer attends the annual service and finds something that needs putting right. The instinct is to leave the visit open until the remedial is done, because it feels like one piece of work and it was one attendance.

It costs you twice. The service now looks unfinished, so the date that somebody else is relying on looks unmet. And the remedial has no date of its own, no price and no owner, which is how remedials sit for months. Close the visit as attended and raise the remedial as its own item, because the person who approves spending money on it is very often not the person who let the engineer in.

Hard services and soft services are the same shape

The trade separates mechanical and electrical work from cleaning, grounds, waste and security, and tenders are written along that line. It is tempting to represent the two as different kinds of record.

They are the same shape: a recurring commitment against a site, attended by someone, evidenced by something. What genuinely differs is who the site contact is and what evidence the client expects afterwards. One shape and a field naming the service line will carry both, and it keeps the site's history in one order instead of two.

Helpdesk usually means a habit instead of a screen

When a facilities contract says helpdesk it normally means someone answers, the request is written down, and the caller is told what is happening. There is nothing here called a helpdesk. There are matters, targets counted in working hours, and on the plans that carry it a portal where a client sees their own matters and nothing else.

If the tender means the first thing, you can meet it. If it means a branded contact centre with call recording and an operator queue, it does not mean this.

Asset register means two different things and only one is here

To a client's finance department an asset register is an inventory with values, condition scores and replacement dates. To the engineer walking in, it is which boiler, where it is, when it was last attended and where the certificate went.

The second is custom fields on the site, or records of their own on Enterprise, with certificates and reports held as files. The first is a different category of product and we do not do it. Both appear in tender documents under the same two words, and it is worth asking which one is being requested before answering yes.

The contract below was invented for this page and written out step by step, because in this trade the cost of not recording something is never visible at the moment you fail to record it. It shows up in a conversation two years later that you could not have predicted.

March: the contract is won and the record is built the obvious wrong way

A contractor with three engineers takes on the maintenance of a parade of eight shop units with flats above them. The client is a managing agent acting for a landlord who owns the freehold.

The obvious first move is to create the managing agent as the customer and type the parade's address into a field on that record. It takes four minutes and it is the source of every problem for the next three years. The agent is who pays. The units are where the work happens. The landlord holds the obligation. The tenants are who ring you.

The alternative is eight site records named for their addresses, with the agent, the landlord and each tenant connected to them by role, each connection carrying a start date. It takes an hour, once, and it is the only decision on this page that cannot easily be repaired later.

April: the schedule stops being a document and becomes dates

The contract schedule names the planned work: the fire alarm quarterly, the emergency lighting monthly, water temperatures monthly, and an annual service on the boiler in each flat. The schedule itself goes on each site as a file, because in eighteen months somebody will be arguing about scope and the argument should be settled by the document.

Then the first occurrence of each item goes in as a dated task against its site. Not the frequency. The next one. Whoever closes it enters the following one before they leave the record, which is the habit the whole thing rests on.

June: a call at ten to five on a Friday

A tenant rings about water coming through a ceiling. On the plans carrying service that becomes a matter against the site, with a target counted in your working hours, so it is due Monday morning rather than breached by Saturday lunchtime when no one was ever attending.

What it costs when nothing is recorded is not the visit. It is that the tenant rings the agent on Saturday, the agent has nothing written down, and the following week is spent arguing about whether you were told at all. No one wins that argument. Both sides remember honestly and differently.

August: the engineer finds something during a service

Servicing the boiler in flat four, the engineer finds a flue arrangement that needs putting right. Two records, not one. The service is attended and closed on the day it happened. The remedial is its own item with its own date, waiting on the landlord's approval by way of the agent, because the tenant who opened the door cannot authorise spending the landlord's money.

Recorded as one item instead of two, the annual service sits open into the autumn, a date somebody else is relying on appears unmet, and the remedial quietly belongs to no one.

October: the landlord changes managing agent

The instinct is to overwrite the contact details, because the new agent is who you deal with now and the old one is irrelevant. Doing that erases the first seven months of the contract from the point of view of anybody asking later.

Ending the connection with a date and starting a new one keeps both. Every visit, instruction and invoice before October remains attributable to the party who gave it, and the new agent's first month is not silently credited with the previous agent's decisions.

February: the renewal that was diarised in November

The contract runs to the end of March with three months' notice. That means the useful date is not March and not December. It is a task in November, before the notice period opens, while the client is still satisfied and while you have something to say about the year that has just been recorded.

A renewal conversation held after the notice window has closed is not a renewal conversation. It is a request to be kept on.

Two years later: somebody asks about 2023

A new agent, an insurer or a solicitor asks who held the contract in the spring of 2023, whether the emergency lighting was tested in a particular quarter, and who instructed the work in flat four.

What answers that is dated tasks marked as done, connections carrying periods, the files attached to the site, and an audit trail of who changed what that nobody can tidy up. What does not answer it is an invoice run and three people remembering.

Worth being precise about what this proves. It is evidence of what was recorded and when, and that is all a record system can ever be. It is not proof that the work was done properly. The engineer's competence is not a database question and no supplier should pretend otherwise.

The duty is usually the client's and you are producing their evidence

For most of the inspection and testing regimes this trade lives on, the obligation belongs to whoever owns or occupies or is responsible for the building. That sits on top of the general duties in the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, with the guidance underneath it published by the Health and Safety Executive rather than by anyone selling software. You are engaged to carry out the work and, just as importantly, to hand over something the responsible person can put in their own file.

That changes what a good record looks like. What the client needs from you is a date, a document and a person who attended. Not a colour on a dashboard. If your records answer those three questions for any visit in the last few years, you are doing the part of this that is yours.

The product knows none of the intervals, deliberately

There is no rules engine here. Nothing in it knows that a particular inspection is annual, or six monthly, or that the guidance changed last year and the interval with it. It will not warn you that a regime applies to a building you have just taken on.

We would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise, because a system that appears to know the rules and is one revision out of date is more dangerous than a system that never claimed to. The interval comes from the regime, your scheme or your competent person. What the product holds is the date you entered and a task that arrives before it.

What it does hold

A dated task before an expiry, which is the same mechanism as the recurring visit. Files against the site and against the visit, so the certificate is where someone will look for it. Connections carrying periods, so responsibility in a given year is answerable. An audit trail of who changed what, which is on every plan including the free one and stays there, and which is how you answer the awkward question of who moved a date.

And a complete export, on every plan, permanently. That one matters at the end of a contract instead of the beginning. When a client moves to another contractor and asks for the records of everything done at their building, the ability to hand it all over without negotiating with your software supplier is worth more than it sounds on the day you sign up.

Certificates are held here, not produced here

No job sheets, no service reports, no certificates generated. Those come from the instrument, the scheme's own software, or the pad in the van. This holds them as files against the site and the visit, which is a filing cabinet with a good index rather than a compliance product.

It is a real limitation and it is worth checking against your own paperwork before you commit, because a business that expected certificate generation will feel misled in week three and would be right to.

The contractual obligations are what people actually get caught by

Statutory duties tend to be understood. What catches maintenance businesses is the contract schedule: the response and rectification times, the notice period on renewal, the requirement to hold insurance at a stated level, the subcontractor's qualifications and when they expire, and the obligation to hand over records at the end.

Every one of those is a date on a record with a task before it. That is unexciting and it is the whole answer. Response times are the exception worth care, because a target counted in elapsed time and a target counted in your working hours produce very different numbers, and the contract usually says which one it means if anyone reads it.

When a tender asks for a compliance system, say what this is

Occasionally a client's tender asks the contractor to operate a compliance management platform with a statutory register, live status per asset and evidence held to a prescribed structure. This is not that, and describing it as that would be a lie you would be found out in during mobilisation.

What it is: a record of the relationships, the commitments and the dates, with the documents attached and a history nobody can quietly edit. If the tender genuinely requires the other thing, either the client's own platform is where that evidence lives or you need to buy one. Losing that tender at the beginning is considerably cheaper than losing it in month four.

Three trades either side of this one keep the same records from their own position: small local service businesses, who have the same recurring work without the contracts, letting and estate agents, who are frequently the client in the example above, and construction firms, who hand a building over and leave the maintenance of it behind. Getting the site list in is covered on import, export and search.