Three kinds of work that behave the same way
Housekeeping, planned maintenance and compliance certificates look like different jobs and share one property: nothing goes wrong at the moment they are missed. A tenant tells you about a broken lock within the hour. Nobody tells you the fire alarm test slipped a month, or the second floor was skipped on Tuesday, until it matters far more than it would have done.
All three live in the Operations Hub, on the same scheduling and reminder machinery.
Housekeeping rounds
Scheduled Housekeeping turns a cleaning rota into tasks with an owner and a record.
Each task sits in a shift — Morning, Afternoon, Evening or Night. A building with a morning cleaner and an evening contractor keeps them apart, and each person opens their phone to their own round rather than the whole day's list.
Tasks are placed by floor, and rounds covering several floors are scheduled per floor so they can be completed and evidenced floor by floor. Filter the board by All floors or All shifts, or narrow to one of each.
Proving it happened
This is the part that earns its keep. Turn on Require a completion photo and a task cannot be closed without one, with a photo retention period you set.
When a tenant says a space was not serviced and a cleaner says it was, you have a timestamped photo rather than two accounts. Completion History holds the full record — what was done, when, by whom, with the notes attached.
Recurring maintenance
Add Maintenance Schedule: title, category, frequency, provider and location, or One-off only for something that does not recur. Assign it, or leave it Nobody assigned and pick someone when it comes up.
The board shows On Track, Due Soon, Due This Week and Overdue, with Today and Upcoming views. Completing a task creates the next occurrence automatically, dated from the completion rather than from the original schedule — so a service done a fortnight late does not immediately show as due again.
Cancel task exists for work that genuinely should not happen. Cancelling is recorded; deleting would not be.
Compliance certificates
Compliance Certs holds each certificate with its Issued and Expiry dates, the provider, and the documents themselves. One record can hold several Files, which is what you want when an inspection produces a certificate plus a schedule of remedial actions.
Statuses are Valid, Expiring Soon and Expired. Compliance Categories are yours to Rename or Remove, so the register matches how your building is actually inspected.
For a UK commercial building that usually means gas safety, EICR, PAT records, fire risk assessment, alarm and emergency lighting tests, legionella, lift inspection where you have one, and insurance.
From warning to somebody's job
Most systems stop at the warning. Raise renewal task turns an approaching expiry into a maintenance task with an assignee and a due date, which then picks up the normal reminder chain.
That is the step that matters. A warning tells you something is expiring; a task makes it a person's job.
Reminders that escalate
Set once in Settings → Email → Notifications, applying to every recurring task including auto-raised compliance renewals:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Due-soon warning | Days before the due date the first warning goes out, and again on the day. 0 means the day only. |
| Reminder chain | An escalating list, for example 30, 14, 7, 1 days before. Assignees and admins are emailed at each step until the task is completed. |
| Compliance expiry warning | How far ahead certificate warnings begin, up to a year. |
| Overdue chase days | Once late, chase at 1, 3, 7, 14 or 30 days. At least one must stay selected. |
The chain repeating until completion is deliberate. A single notification into a busy inbox is indistinguishable from no notification.
Who does this work
Cleaners get their own role: they see housekeeping and the tickets assigned to them, and nothing else. Everything is designed for a phone, because this work happens while walking the building rather than at a desk.
Related
Reactive requests are the other half — see maintenance and ticketing. Costs recorded against this work post to their own accounts through the Xero integration.