Maintenance software for coworking spaces: from the member's complaint to the technician, in someone else's building

What breaks in a coworking space and who sees it

A coworking space is an office used by thirty companies at once, with café opening hours. What gives the most trouble is what they all share: the air conditioning in the meeting rooms, the screen that will not connect to the visitor's laptop, the wifi, the sockets on the long shared desks, the phone booths, the printer, the coffee machine and the dishwasher in the kitchen, the toilets and the door that ought to open with the card.

Whoever notices the fault is hardly ever staff. It is somebody from a member company, with a meeting in ten minutes, who mentions it to the community manager in the corridor or drops it into the community chat. The community manager, hired to look after people and fill the space, ends up as a switchboard: noting things from memory, ringing the technician when there is a moment and answering the same question three times, because three different members have seen the same room at twenty-nine degrees.

Fault by fault: who reports it and who repairs it

The table fits a mid-sized space, one or two rented floors inside an office building. In yours the names will change, not the picture.

Two things stand out. First, in no row does the person who repairs do the reporting, nor even someone who works at the space. Second, there are at least five recipients and the member knows none of them, and has no reason to.

A tenant looking up, a landlord looking down

The operator of a coworking space sits in an odd position. To its members it answers for everything, because it is the only one they know: if the lift has been stopped for three days, the front desk takes the anger even though the lift belongs to the owner of the property. And to that owner it is one more tenant, able only to ask and wait.

That is why the date matters so much to the operator. Being able to tell the building's managing agent “we reported it on Tuesday at ten past nine, and it is the third time this quarter” changes the conversation. And being able to tell the member “it has been called in since yesterday, the lift company has it” saves the community manager half a morning. No software makes the landlord answer sooner; what it can achieve is that the report always leaves by the same route and stays in writing. The general split between tenant and landlord, for a company in its own office, is covered in maintenance software for offices.

There is also an underlying duty: people from other companies work in the room, but the room is provided by the coworking space. What Spanish health and safety law asks when several companies share a roof is summed up on the incidents in coworking spaces page, and your adviser confirms it.

Six questions for the demo

Take them written down. The answers quickly separate a product designed for a factory from one that suits you.

• Who can report, and from where? If members report, ask how two hundred people who change every month get signed up. If only the team reports, ask how long the community manager takes to pass on what they have just been told: it has to be quicker than jotting it on paper.
• What happens when three people report the same thing? Ask to be shown it with the room that has no air conditioning. You want to see what gets recorded and what each of them is told.
• How does it decide who gets it? Air conditioning, network, cleaning, kitchen and building have five owners. If the person reporting picks from a drop-down, that is a bad sign.
• What does the outside technician have to install? The air-conditioning firm and the coffee-machine firm serve many clients. If they need a login to your system, they will not use it.
• And at nine at night, with the space open and the front desk empty? A coworking space with round-the-clock access needs serious things to reach someone and minor ones to wait without getting lost.
• What do I take to the meeting with the landlord? Dates and times of every report, in a format you can open without asking anybody's permission.

When a full CMMS is worth it and when it is too much

It is worth it when the operator also runs the property: a whole building with its plant room, its chillers, its generator and one or more technicians on the payroll. There you have equipment to register, preventive schedules to plan and hours to book, and that is what a CMMS does. Likewise when a chain of flexible workspaces wants to compare all its sites on one dashboard and share a crew between them.

It is too much in the commonest case: one or two rented floors, a community manager, perhaps a part-time maintenance person and half a dozen outside firms. There the inventory fits on one sheet and what gets lost is not a fact about the machine but the report. The kinds of product between one extreme and the other are in maintenance software, and the cut-down version for small companies, in CMMS for small businesses.

Where Bedel fits in a coworking space, and what it leaves out

Bedel covers the stretch from the corridor to the technician's mobile, and it is not a CMMS. The space has a WhatsApp number and a list of people who may write to it: the community manager, the front desk, maintenance, cleaning. When a member company says the North room is not cooling, the community manager forwards it as it stands, with a text, a photo of the thermostat or a voice note while still walking. Bedel opens a ticket with its number and its time, understands it is air conditioning and sends it to whoever you have set for that. If the unit belongs to the building and the landlord has agreed to appear as one more role, it goes to them.

The technician receives it on their own WhatsApp, with nothing to download, and replies from there. The community manager gets one message when someone takes charge and another when it is sorted, so they can tell the member without chasing anybody. Whatever you have marked as urgent, people shut in the lift for instance, rings the on-call phone even at eleven at night. And if a category's deadline goes by, the ticket moves up to whoever is above.

Three times are kept for every report (when it was raised, when it was accepted and when it was closed) and everything downloads as an Excel file: that is the sheet you show the building's managing agent. Separately, whoever runs maintenance receives a monthly WhatsApp reminder of the inspections that have a date. What it does not do is worth knowing before the call:

• It does not take reports straight from member companies: the people on the space's list do the writing.
• It does not book rooms or desks, does not manage cards and does not open doors.
• It holds no equipment inventory and no work orders with materials, hours and costs.
• It does not file inspection certificates.
• It does not connect to the booking system or to any other.
• It does not gather several sites on one screen: each site is one account, with its own number.

Data is stored in the European Union. The product, with its scenes, is in incidents in coworking spaces and the general explanation in incident management on WhatsApp. If what you are after is an app for each member to ask for things from their phone, the comparison is in maintenance request software.