Preventive Maintenance Scheduling That Books Its Own Next Visit

What a schedule actually holds

A title, an optional description of the task, an interval, and the date it is next due. That is the whole form. Attach it to a specific unit, or leave it at building level for the jobs that are not about one machine — walking the roof, flushing the condensate lines in the east wing. A building-level schedule files its completed work against the site rather than inventing an asset to hang it on.

Intervals are counted in days, weeks or months, or set to once for something that happens one time. Six presets fill the form in a tap: Change Filter every 3 months, Coil Cleaning every 6, Belt Replacement every 12, Lube Bearings every 12, Condensate Drain Cleaning every 6, and General Inspection every 12. Every field they fill in is still editable — they are a head start, not a template system you have to live inside.

Completing one writes the service log

Marking a schedule complete asks for the date, the technician, the company and what was done, then does three things in a single transaction: it inserts a maintenance log against the equipment, links that log back to the schedule it came from, and advances the next due date. There is no state where the visit was recorded but the schedule still says it is overdue, or the other way round.

The completion screen also records the parts that went in. Under PARTS USED, SELECT INSTALLED PARTS OR INVENTORY lists the unit’s installed parts and the location’s inventory that fits it: tap + for each one used, and with Deduct from stock ticked it comes off the inventory count when the completion is saved — untick it for a part bought for the job. The parts have their last-replaced date moved, and they are named in the log entry, so the record says which filter, rather than leaving somebody to work it out from the date a month later.

A schedule set to once keeps the date it was planned for and switches itself off, instead of overwriting the plan with the day it happened to be done. Everything else advances by its own interval from the completion date.

Closing one that was not done

Not every visit happens. Close a PM or a work order as Completed or Not completed and give a reason: on vacation or away, no access, equipment off or out of service, rescheduled, parts not available, or other, with an optional note. A PM closed as not completed moves to its next due date on its own schedule and its reminders stop for the missed date.

A not-completed close is never billed and never counted as a completed PM. It shows with its reason on the service log of the unit, on reports such as PM History and the Maintenance Summary, on the public QR page and to customers. The reminder itself has a Not done this time button, a reminder can be snoozed until a date you pick, and tapping an item on the Maintenance Calendar opens that item.

The short-month problem, and why the date is right

A monthly schedule completed on the 31st has to land on a date the next month actually has. Adding a month naively produces 31 February, which rolls forward to 3 March — so a monthly filter change completed on 31 January skipped straight to March, and drifted further every cycle after that. On a filter or an inspection that is a whole missed visit, and nothing on screen would have told you.

The interval clamps to the last day of the target month instead: 31 January plus one month is 28 or 29 February. Worth saying plainly because it was wrong on the phone for a while after it had already been fixed on the dashboard, which meant the same schedule advanced to two different dates depending on where it was completed. Both now run the identical rule.

Reminders, and exactly what they need

Your phone schedules its own reminders, straight from the due dates already in its database. That means they need no signal, no server and no subscription, and they arrive on your clock rather than on somebody else’s — the job that used to do this ran once a day on a single New York clock for every user on the planet, which put a technician in California hours out.

Every reminder is set on its own. Open Settings → Notifications → Set each reminder individually and each PM, replacement date and part is listed separately, with its own number of days of warning, its own time of day, and its own on/off switch. Anything you have not touched follows your general setting — three days ahead for a PM, seven for equipment and parts, at 8:00 local. A PM due tomorrow morning can warn you the night before; a belt you need time to order can warn you two weeks out.

One thing still comes from the cloud, and it is the honest boundary: a PM you assign to a teammate or to several people. Your phone cannot schedule a notification on their phone, so the server delivers that one — which means it needs the schedule to have reached the cloud. Everything about your own equipment is on the device and free.

Where they turn up

The PM Schedules screen groups everything by building and sorts each group by next due date, with anything due today or earlier marked overdue. A schedule can be paused and resumed rather than deleted, which is what you want for a machine that is out of service rather than out of your life.

The maintenance calendar puts PM schedules on the same month view as equipment and part replacement reminders and open work orders, so one screen answers "what is coming up" instead of four.

On a crew, a manager or a tech can create, edit, complete and delete a schedule; a viewer can read but not write. Assigning a schedule to a teammate also redirects its reminder to them, so the person who has to do the work is the person whose phone goes off.

Give a schedule to several people, or to Whole team, and each person’s own phone reminds them. On a schedule shared like that, snoozing a reminder snoozes only yours.

Irregular days

For days that do not repeat evenly, such as a pickup calendar, tap SPECIFIC DATES under the frequency and tap each day on the calendar (on the dashboard, pick Specific dates in Frequency Unit). Each day is its own due date and gets its own reminder, and after the last day the schedule is done.

Frequently asked questions

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