A leak in room 12 gets to the caretaker, not the staff room noticeboard
Maintenance software for a private school. A code by the door means a teacher reports it in thirty seconds without an account, and gets a link that follows the repair. Boiler checks and alarm tests raise themselves on the right morning.
Term-time is the busy time
Everything urgent happens in the eleven weeks somebody is least able to chase it.
Inspections have dates
Emergency lighting, fire doors, the boiler. Set the interval once and the job appears with its checklist.
Caretakers are not at desks
Their whole application is two screens, and both work one-handed on a phone.
Who sees what
A teacher sees a poster. They scan it, say what is wrong and where, add a photo if they have one, and send it. There is no account and nothing to install, and the link they get back shows whether anybody has read it, who has the job, and when it was closed. That is everything a teacher needs from a maintenance system and it is all they are given.
The caretaker sees a queue: what is overdue, what is due today, and what nobody has taken yet. Opening a job shows the room, the photo, the checklist if there is one, and every job that has ever touched that piece of equipment, in order. A label on the boiler itself opens that boiler’s history, and raises a job against it, from a phone in the plant room.
The bursar sees the report they were about to be asked for. Which inspections happened on the day and which slipped, what the stores cost this term, and all of it as a file, one per table, whenever they want it and without asking anybody.
The first afternoon
Name the buildings and the rooms. You can type them in, or paste the list the timetable already uses. Print the poster and put it by the staff room door. Invite the caretaker, who signs in with the Google or Microsoft account the school already gave them.
Then set the first schedule. The boiler service, the emergency lighting test, the fire door check: each one gets an interval and a checklist, and from then on the job appears on the right morning with the checklist attached. Nobody has to remember it, and the record of it having been done is the job itself.
If the school is moving from something else, six spreadsheets bring the old system across: places, people, parts, equipment, the inspection calendar and the job history. The import is free on every plan and you run it yourself.
A term later
By half term the compliance report says which checks happened on time and which did not, and it says it from the jobs rather than from anybody’s memory. The cost summary adds up what was drawn from the stores, priced at the moment it was drawn. Every change to anything is in the audit log with the person who made it.
A school with a prep department on a second site gives its caretaker that site and nothing else. Their queue, their reports and their history are the buildings they actually walk round, and the bursar still sees the whole estate.
Nobody has to watch the queue to know it moved. A report arriving, a job being assigned, a check falling due: each one is a notification in the app for the people who asked to be told, and each person chooses which of them they want.
When the governors ask, the answer is a file rather than an afternoon of reconstruction.
What it will not do
There is no mobile app and nothing works offline. Everything runs in a phone’s browser, which is fine in a corridor and no use in a basement with no signal. It does not log time: a job records what was done and what it cost in parts, never how many hours it took. It raises no purchase orders and does not talk to the finance system.
And on the free plan it will not book the hall. That is the one thing a school reaches for first, so it is named at the top of this page rather than discovered at the moment somebody tries it.