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Planned Work

Preventive Maintenance Scheduling That Books Its Own Next Visit

Free in the app, reminders included. The web dashboard is Pro.

A PM schedule is a standing instruction attached to one machine or to a whole building: what to do, how often, and when it is next due. Completing one writes the service log and moves the date forward in the same database transaction, so the plan and the history cannot disagree with each other.

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 lets the tech tick the parts they actually replaced. Those parts have their last-replaced date moved, and the ones that resolved to a real installed part 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.

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. 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.

Frequently asked questions

Do PM schedules work without a signal?

Yes — including the reminder. Schedules live in the app’s local database and the reminder is scheduled by the phone itself, so it arrives with no connection at all, and the service log is written on the device. The one exception is a PM you assign to a teammate, which the server has to deliver because your phone cannot schedule a notification on theirs.

Is preventive maintenance scheduling free?

Yes. Creating schedules, completing them, the maintenance log each completion writes, the maintenance calendar and the reminder are all free in the app — the reminder is scheduled on your own phone, so it costs nothing to deliver. The web dashboard is the Pro part. Assigning a PM to a teammate, and the reminder that goes to their phone, is the Team plan.

Can one schedule cover a whole building?

Yes. Leave the equipment field empty and the schedule belongs to the building. Its completed work is filed against the site rather than against a single machine, which is the right home for jobs that are not about one unit.

What happens to the parts I replace during a PM?

Tick them on the completion screen. Each one has its last-replaced date moved to the completion date, and the parts that matched a real installed part are named in the maintenance log the completion writes.

How far ahead does the reminder arrive?

Three days ahead for a PM by default, seven for equipment and parts, at 8:00 on your own clock — and you can change any of it. Every reminder can be set on its own in Settings → Notifications: its own days of warning, its own time of day, or switched off entirely. Anything you do not touch follows your general setting.

Read next

Work orders — the unplanned half of the same job → Invoicing — billing the visit you just completed → Parts & inventory, and what a PM consumes → How maintenance logs are recorded → What is free and what is Pro →

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Core tracking is free forever and works with no signal. Pro adds cloud sync, the web dashboard, AI scanning and the hosted QR codes.

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