Maintenance ticket software is usually a help-desk product with the vocabulary changed, and the borrowing is not unreasonable: a fault reported, triaged, assigned and closed is the same shape as an IT ticket. One difference matters enormously and it is the one most often lost in translation. An IT ticket belongs to a person; a maintenance ticket belongs to a machine. Get that wrong and you accumulate a year of well-managed tickets from which nothing can be learned about any asset, which is the specific failure mode of help-desk software used for maintenance.
The ticket must carry an asset, not just a location
'Second floor, north end' identifies where somebody was standing, not what is broken. Without an asset the ticket cannot join the history, and the history is the entire reason to keep tickets rather than answer messages. This is the single field to insist on.
Triage is priority, and priority is consequence
Help-desk urgency scales are about the reporter's inconvenience. Maintenance priority is about what stops, what it costs and whether anybody gets hurt. Reusing the wrong scale gives you a board where the loudest requester is always top.
Tickets and scheduled work belong on one board
A maintenance function that manages tickets in one system and PM in another cannot see its own load. On the worked example this site publishes, 66 PM hours a month and 84 reactive jobs are the same technicians' time, and separating them is how a schedule gets quietly abandoned.
Closing needs a finding, not a resolution code
'Fixed' is a help-desk answer. 'Coupling insert worn, replaced' is a maintenance one, and only the second can ever change an interval. Resolution codes are fine as well as the sentence, and useless instead of it.
Questions people ask about maintenance ticket software
Can we use our IT help desk for maintenance?
Only if you can add a mandatory asset field and a priority scale of your own. Without both you get tidy tickets and no asset history.
Should occupants raise tickets directly?
Yes, by the shortest route you can build: a QR code by the door beats a portal login for people who report a fault twice a year.
Do tickets need SLAs?
Internally, rarely. SLAs are a contractual device; inside an organisation a written priority scale with expected response times does the same work with less ceremony.