Maintenance software for offices: what the tenant fixes, what the landlord fixes and how faults get reported

What gets maintained in an office

Few machines and many people. An office of forty may have three air-conditioning units, a distribution board, two toilets, a small kitchen, four meeting rooms with a screen and a door with a card reader. None of that justifies a technician on the payroll. What there is instead is one person, office manager, admin or facilities, on whom everything lands, and an address book of suppliers: the air-conditioning firm, the electrician, the cleaners, the coffee-machine company, IT.

That is why products conceived for a factory fit badly. They are good for planning a technical crew's week and tracking each machine, and in an office the job is a different one: finding out, knowing whose it is and getting the outside firm to come.

Whose fault it is to fix

In a rented office, the lease decides who pays and who repairs. Every lease is different, so the middle column of this table shows what is usual, not a rule: yours is what counts.

The table shows the underlying problem: there are at least five different recipients, and whoever comes across the fault has no reason to know any of them. If the product makes them choose a category, a building and an owner on a form, they will choose wrongly or say nothing.

When the repair is the building owner's

This is the case that wears people down most. The office cannot repair the leak or the lift; it can only ask and wait. What changes the conversation with the landlord or its managing agent is having three facts: which day and at what time it was reported, to whom, and how many times it had happened before. With them, the claim is a fact; without them, a complaint.

Maintenance software will not force the landlord to answer. What it does achieve is that the report always goes out the same way, to the person the landlord has named, and that it is dated. If that person agrees to receive it on their phone, so much the better; if not, at least the record exists on your side.

What to demand of a product for an office

• Anyone can report without training. Staff turn over, there are interns, there are people who come in two days a week. Anything that needs a username and password will be used by three people.
• The product does the routing. Whoever sees the fault says what is happening and where. Deciding whether it is for the electrician, IT or the building is up to whoever set it up once.
• The supplier does not have to log into anything. The air-conditioning technician serves fifty clients; they are not going to open each one's portal.
• The person who reported knows how it is going. That is what stops the daily question at the office manager's desk.
• A date is left. Of the report, of the moment someone took charge and of the repair. That is what gets used later with the supplier and with the landlord.
• It reminds you of inspections. In Spain an office has them too: extinguishers, air conditioning, the electrical installation depending on the case, the lift if it is yours. The list, in regulations for offices.

What an office hardly ever needs is a machine inventory, a spares store or a cost calculation per unit. If a product loads you with the complexity of all that, you are buying one meant for another kind of company. Which kinds there are, in maintenance software; and if in your company this goes by facilities and covers more than faults, in facility management software.

Several floors, several sites, a coworking space

Two cases fall outside the pattern. One is the company with several floors or several sites: there it matters whether the product keeps each one separate or mixes them, and whether management wants to see them together. The other is shared space: in a coworking space the fault is seen by a member company, which tells the community manager, and the operator acts as both tenant and landlord. That case has its own page, incidents in coworking spaces. And whoever runs the whole property, not an office inside it, will find their comparison in building maintenance software.

Where Bedel fits, and what it does not do

Bedel does the reporting part and is not a CMMS. The office has a WhatsApp number and a list with the mobiles of those who may write to it; it is loaded once, from a sheet. An employee notices the meeting-room air conditioning is not cooling, types it or sends a photo, and gets a ticket number back. Bedel understands it is air conditioning and sends it to whoever you have set for that category: your air-conditioning technician, IT if it is the screen, the cleaning contractor if it is a spill, or the landlord's contact if the repair is theirs and they have agreed to receive it. Each replies from their own WhatsApp, with nothing to install.

The employee receives one message when someone accepts it and another when it is sorted, so they stop asking. If it is urgent by your own definition, water coming down on the desks for instance, it rings the on-call phone at any hour. If the deadline runs out, it goes up to the person responsible. Everything ends up in an Excel file with the time of the report, of acceptance and of closure, which is what you take to the meeting with the supplier or the building's managing agent. And once a month, whoever runs maintenance receives the reminder of dated inspections. The product page is incidents in offices, and the general one, incident management on WhatsApp.

What it does not do in an office:

• It does not book rooms or desks and does not control access.
• It holds no machine inventory and no orders with materials, hours and costs.
• It does not store contracts, records or certificates.
• It does not connect to the landlord's portal or to the IT help desk.
• It does not show several offices on one screen: each office or building is one account with its own number.
• It does not take reports from visitors or from anyone missing from the list.

Data is stored in the European Union. If you are after an app on every employee's phone, the comparison is in maintenance app; if it is a place to ask for repairs, in maintenance request software.