Building maintenance tracking software is bought by two very different people and sold as one product. One is a facilities management company running buildings as a service for clients, whose problem is contracts, SLAs and billing. The other is an organisation maintaining a building it occupies, whose problem is a plant room, a statutory inspection list and a stream of faults reported by the people who work there. This page is written for the second, because that is the buyer whose asset register looks like a maintenance register rather than a client list.
The plant room is the register that matters
Boilers, chillers, air handling, pumps, lifts, generators, fire systems. There are rarely more than a few dozen and they carry almost all of the cost and all of the risk. A building register that lists three hundred rooms and omits the plant has inventoried the wrong thing.
Statutory items behave differently and must be marked
Lift inspections, pressure systems, fire alarms, emergency lighting: intervals set by somebody else, evidence retained for a stated period, and completion that should not be casually back-dated. Flag them in the same register rather than keeping a second list, because two lists drift.
The reactive stream comes from non-maintenance people
Occupants report faults, and they will not fight a form. The raise has to be two taps and a photograph, or you will get emails instead and the record will live in an inbox. This is the single design constraint that decides whether the tracking is real.
Price the schedule before agreeing it
The same arithmetic as any other register: assets times tasks a year times hours, against the people you have. On the worked example this site publishes that is 66 technician hours a month, $3,168 at a $48 loaded rate.
Questions people ask about building maintenance tracking software
Is this the same as facilities management software?
No, and the distinction is the object. Facilities management software manages buildings as a service, with clients, contracts and SLAs. This manages the equipment in a building you occupy.
Should tenants or staff have logins?
Give them a raise-only route rather than a login: a QR code by the door or a link that asks for a location, a description and a photograph. Logins for occasional reporters go unused and then unfixed.
What about cleaning and grounds?
Different work with different management, usually contracted. Tracking them in a maintenance register makes the register noisier without making either job better.