Maintenance log
- What reacting costs a month
- $9,273.60
- Breakdown jobs a month
- 84
- Avoidable hours a month
- 193.2
- Per breakdown
- $110.40
Every figure printed on this site is arithmetic on the worked example we publish: 180 assets, 240 work orders a month, 35% of them raised as breakdowns, a breakdown job at 3.4 hours against 1.1 hours planned, a loaded technician cost of $48 an hour. Change any of those on the worksheet and the numbers change with them. Nothing here is a market statistic and nothing is quoted from a third party.
The figures above start from a worked example ($9,273.60). Change any input and the answer updates as you type.
Download the Maintenance log worked example (CSV)
A maintenance log is where the history lives, and history is what turns a schedule from an opinion into a decision. This worksheet is the argument for keeping one, in money. It takes the work you already do, splits it into the part somebody scheduled and the part that arrived as a breakdown, and prices the difference, because the same job genuinely costs more when nobody planned it: parts are not to hand, the machine stops at the wrong moment, and somebody spends the first hour finding the manual.
Count the work orders, and be honest about the split
240 a month with 35% raised as breakdowns is the worked example on this site. Count anything nobody scheduled as reactive, including the ones that felt small: it is the count that moves the number, not the size.
Time both versions of the same job
3.4 hours reactive against 1.1 hours planned is the default here and it is deliberately modest; teams that time it often find worse. The gap is the parts hunt, the wait, and the second trip.
Read the annual figure, then look at the schedule
$9,273.60 a month is $111,283.20 a year in labour that a schedule would have avoided. That is the number to put beside a subscription price, and it is the number the log exists to produce.
Maintenance log: common questions
Does this include the cost of the machine standing still? No, deliberately. Downtime cost varies by an order of magnitude between sites and any number we picked would be a guess. This worksheet prices labour only, which makes it a floor rather than an estimate.
What if we do not know our reactive share? Then that is the first thing worth measuring, and a month of counting will do it. Most teams guess low.
Is 3.4 hours against 1.1 realistic? It is conservative. The ratio in the maintenance literature is usually worse, and the point of the worksheet is that you put your own two numbers in rather than take ours.