Maintenance work orders

Maintenance is where a strata corporation is judged. Owners forgive a slow decision far more readily than a repair nobody ever answered for.

Maintenance.

The stages

A work order moves through six stages, and the current one is visible to everyone who can see it — including the owner who reported it.

Cancelled is a seventh state, but it isn't a stage on that path — it's an exit from it, and the job records which stage it stopped at. Cancelling asks you to confirm, because it's the one move that takes a job off the open list.

The council's page says where a job has got to in words — "Stage 4 of 6" — above the one button that moves it on. The owner's view of their own request draws the full trail instead: a marker per stage with the date under each one actually reached, and the contractor's name under Assigned.

The list is sorted by what's waiting

Maintenance groups open jobs by what each one is waiting for rather than listing them all by date — New requests, Ready for a vendor, Waiting to start, Work under way, Awaiting sign-off — and empty queues aren't shown. A council arriving at the page is asking "what needs me", and each heading answers it.

The job page reads as a sequence

A work order used to be five panels stacked down a page, and briefly three tabs. It is now the four things you do to a repair, in the order you do them, each one collapsible:

1. What was reported

   The description, the photographs, the lot it concerns. The trade you call out and the priority you set are both chosen from this, so it is worth it being right.

2. Get prices

   Find who could do it, ask them for a figure, and accept the one council decides on. Accepting also gives that contractor the job.

3. Do the work

   Move the job along as it happens, and keep the conversation here rather than in somebody's inbox.

4. Tell the owners

   Optional, and usually done once the work is arranged.

The step the job is actually at is open; the rest are collapsed behind a line that still says where they stand — "3 quotes · none accepted" — so nothing is hidden and nothing has to be hunted for. Which step is open is worked out from the job itself, not from where you last clicked, because a work order isn't filled in once by one person: it's picked up on Tuesday by whoever is free.

Edit details in the header corrects what the job is — title, description, priority, the component it belongs to, the vendor. Moving it between stages stays on the progress card. A priority typed wrong when the request came in used to be permanent.

The thread on each job

Every work order has a conversation attached, shared by the people in it: the council, the manager, the owner whose lot it concerns, and whoever reported it. "Which tap?" — "the ensuite one" — "the plumber comes Thursday" now lives on the job instead of in one council member's texts.

Each message says which seat its author spoke from — council, manager, owner — because most council members also own a lot, and "the council said" and "an owner said" are different sentences in a dispute.

What's new to you

The sidebar badges Maintenance with the number of jobs filed since you last looked — not since the corporation last looked. An owner files a leak at 2am; by morning one council member has read it and the other two haven't, and the badge tells each of the three the truth about their own reading.

Opening the page clears your own count and nobody else's.

Who gets emailed

The badge tells you what's new once you're already looking at the dashboard, which is the one thing a volunteer council doesn't do daily. Three things now leave the building as email:

Nobody is emailed about their own click, which is what makes the council-filed case work: a job logged by one councillor is news to the other four.

The recipients are exactly the people who can already open the job's thread — council, manager, the holder of the lot, and whoever filed it — and no wider. A page can be re-secured; an email cannot be un-sent.

A status change is written in words, not in the product's vocabulary: an owner is told a contractor is lined up, not that the row is in_progress.

How a work order starts

An owner reports it. From their portal — or straight from their overview, which now has a way in — describe the issue and attach photographs. It arrives as requested. They can open the job afterwards to read the stages and answer questions in its thread.

Up to six photographs per request, as PNG, JPEG or WebP, 8 MB each. A maintenance request was one line of text for a long time, and "leak under the kitchen sink" leaves the council guessing between a dripping trap and a ceiling coming down in the lot below — a guess that sets the priority, the trade called out, and how fast anybody moves. The picture that settles it is already on the owner's phone.

Council raises it. MaintenanceNew work order for anything found on inspection, arising from a directive, or scheduled from your component schedule.

Triage

The judgement step, and worth doing properly.

1. Is it the corporation's responsibility?

   Common property is the corporation's; inside a lot is usually the owner's — but your bylaws govern, and the boundary is exactly where disputes live. When it's genuinely unclear, decide it at council and minute it.

2. How urgent?

   Safety and active water damage come first, whatever else is queued.

3. Which fund?

   Routine repair is operating. A major planned replacement is the reserve. Decide before the invoice arrives, not after.

4. Who does it?

   A vendor from your directory. On the Council plan, AI vendor match suggests one from your directory based on the trade and who's currently insured.

Getting prices

For anything substantial, get more than one quote. Owners ask, and "we got three quotes" carries far more weight when you can produce them.

Quotes hang off the work order, not off the vendor and not in the document library, because the question they answer is which bid to take for this job. A quote records the vendor, the amount, the scope, the reference the contractor put on it, and the date the price holds until. Accepting one also gives that contractor the job — one press, both effects, which is the whole reason bids live here rather than in a folder.

The list is not sorted cheapest-first

Deliberately. The list stays in the order the bids arrived; above it, the count and the spread are stated as a fact, and the lowest is marked. The low bid is routinely low for a reason — the flashing is excluded, or the insurance lapsed in March — and a council that takes the middle bid has to be able to say why it did.

Each bid also shows how much life the price has left, on the same scale as a vendor certificate: current, expiring within 30 days, expired, or no expiry stated.

Let the contractor file their own bid

The step that doesn't happen at nine at night after a meeting is somebody keying a roofer's PDF into a form — and a bid nobody keys in is a bid the comparison doesn't have.

So you can generate a quote link, one per vendor per job, and send it to them. They open it, enter their figure, attach their PDF, and it lands as a quote on the right work order. No account, no password.

Quotes are council and manager only. The job's photographs and thread deliberately admit the lot's owner and whoever filed it; competing prices are procurement, and that's a different question.

Assigning a vendor

Accepting a quote assigns its vendor. Where you're not taking bids, the job offers a ranked list of contractors from your directory — a row each, showing the trade, the certificate status and anything the research found — and one press fills the row in and arms the button below it. It used to be a dropdown, which on a directory of one contractor opened a popup showing the option that was already showing, and was indistinguishable from a press that did nothing.

Mark as assigned without choosing anybody is still there, for a contractor you booked outside the directory — but it leaves the job assigned to nobody, which is worth knowing before you press it. If the directory is empty, the job says so and links you to add somebody rather than offering a list of nothing.

While the work happens

Keep the record on the work order rather than in an inbox: quotes, scheduling, photographs before and after, complications, the decision to vary the scope. Say it in the job's thread and the owner sees it without anyone forwarding anything. The work order is what a future council will read when the same component fails again.

For anything that disrupts the building — water shut off, scaffolding, parkade closed — post an announcement. A work order can be announced to owners directly.

Closing it out

1. Confirm the work is actually done

   Ideally someone looks.

2. Record the expense

   Against the right fund, linked to the work order. Payments and expenses →

3. Link it to the component

   If it was a reserve item — a roof, a boiler, a membrane — record it against the component. That's what keeps the next reserve projection honest.

4. File the warranty

   In the document library. A warranty nobody can find is a warranty nobody claims on.

5. Close it

   The owner who reported it sees it close.

Maintenance Triage

CouncilThe Maintenance Triage agent is included on the Council plan and above.

It reviews incoming requests, proposes a priority, and suggests an insured vendor from your directory. Every suggestion is added or dismissed by a person, and anything added becomes a tracked action item in the audit trail. See AI agents.

Recurring work

Annual inspections and servicing are better handled as tracked duties on the compliance calendar, which reminds you before they're due. Raise the work order when the duty comes round, so you keep both the reminder and the record of who did it and what it cost.

Patterns worth noticing

Three separate leaks on the same stack is one problem, not three work orders. The history is there to be read: before approving a fourth repair to the same component, look at what the first three cost. That's usually the moment a repair becomes a reserve project.