5How the maintenance year is built
The planned maintenance year for a building is built from the expiry dates of its certificates, the service intervals specified for its plant, and the last condition inspection, resolved into one dated schedule per building.
A visit falls outside that schedule where a fault is reported, where an inspection returns a defect that cannot wait, or where a certificate runs out earlier than the schedule assumed, in which case the earlier date governs; access is arranged by notice and appointment, and an attempt that fails is dated on the unit’s file.
The schedule is built per building and never per portfolio, since the plant, the certificates and the condition of one building have nothing to say about another, whereas a single portfolio-wide diary would flatten exactly the differences the schedule exists to hold.
5.4What goes into the schedule
Three sources and no others: the certificate register, which supplies expiry dates; the plant records, which supply service intervals; and the last condition inspection, which supplies the defects that were observed but did not need attending on the day.
Anything that cannot be traced to one of those three is not planned maintenance and belongs in the repair log instead, which keeps the schedule honest about what it is actually predicting.
5.5Diarised backwards, not forwards
Every dated item on the schedule is counted back from the day the certificate expires or the interval runs out, rather than counted forward from the day the last visit happened, so that a visit which ran late does not quietly push the whole sequence later.
5.6Access, and an attempt that failed
Access is arranged by notice and appointment, and where an attendance cannot be made the attempt itself is dated on the unit’s file with what was arranged and what happened, because a gap in a schedule with no explanation beside it is indistinguishable from work that was never ordered.
6A reported fault, from receipt to close-off
A fault reaches the office from an occupier writing to the correspondence address, from a contractor attending for another matter, or from a diarised inspection, and is entered the same working day with the unit reference, the description as given, and the date of receipt.
Reports are ordered by consequence and not by arrival, so anything bearing on safety, on the water-tightness of a building or on the loss of a service to a whole unit is attended before work that reduces amenity without removing it.
The contractor is instructed against the unit reference so the cost lands on the correct head, and the report is closed only once the work has been evidenced twice — by the completion note or invoice and by confirmation from the occupier — with anything short of that carried into the next review of open items.
6.4Band one — safety
Anything bearing on the safety of an occupier or of the building itself, which is attended ahead of everything else on the log regardless of when it was reported and regardless of what it will cost to attend.
A report entered in a lower band is raised into this one the moment information arrives that puts it here, and the change carries the date it was made so the sequence can be read afterwards.
6.5Band two — water-tightness
Anything letting water into a structure, whether from outside or from a service inside it, on the reasoning that the cost of a water problem multiplies with the time it is left and almost nothing else on the log behaves that way.
6.6Band three — loss of a service
The complete loss of heating, hot water, power or the lift serving a unit, as distinct from a service working badly, which sits in the band below. The distinction is drawn on whether the service is available at all rather than on how well it performs.
6.7Band four — reduced amenity
Work that makes a unit less pleasant without making it unusable. It is real work and it is scheduled rather than deferred indefinitely, whereas it gives way to the three bands above it whenever the two compete for the same visit.
Batching band four work for a building into one attendance is the ordinary way it is done, since a single visit that clears six small items costs a fraction of six visits that clear one each.
Closed reports are not archived out of sight at the end of a year, to the extent that the repair history of a unit is one of the three sources the next maintenance schedule is built from, in which case a log that disappears takes the schedule with it.