Preventive maintenance schedule template for shared equipment

Forty items, three people, and nobody owns the calendar. A schedule sheet you can copy, sensible starting intervals by gear type, and a ten-minute monthly review.

In this article

• The schedule sheet
• Starting intervals by gear type
• The ten-minute monthly review
• The trap: booking gear out on the day it is due
• Where Itefy fits

The harness inspection was due last month. So was the ladder check, the projector lamp swap and the AED pad replacement. Nobody noticed, because there are forty items on eleven different intervals, three people who might have been the one to look, and no single place that says what is due next.

You do not need convincing that scheduling maintenance matters. You need a schedule that survives three people and a busy month. This is a sheet you can copy and a set of starting intervals.

The schedule sheet

Six columns, one row per recurring task — not per item, because one item can carry two intervals.

Sort by "next due", ascending. That is the whole operating principle. The top of the sheet is what to do; everything below is not your problem this month.

Owner is a role, not a name. "AV lead" survives the AV lead leaving. A person's name in that column is a schedule with an expiry date.

Calculate next due from when it was actually done, not from when it was supposed to be. Otherwise a task missed once stays permanently out of step and the sheet slowly becomes fiction.

Starting intervals by gear type

Manufacturer's manual first, always. Where there is no manual — or where the manual assumes daily industrial use and you use the thing eight times a year — these are reasonable places to start.

Two notes on this table. Anything with a legal or insurance inspection requirement — height safety, lifting equipment, electrical testing, extinguishers — is not a judgement call, and the interval comes from the regulation, not from here. And items that live inside other items (the generator in the van, the drill in the crib) need their own row, because nothing external forces the issue for them.

The ten-minute monthly review

Once a month, one person, ten minutes:

1. Sort by next due. Look at the top of the sheet.
2. Anything overdue: do it, book it, or consciously push it and change the date.
3. Anything due in the next month: put it in the diary now, while the item is not needed.
4. Anything you have missed twice: the interval is probably wrong. Change it rather than continuing to miss it.

That last point is the one that keeps a schedule honest. A task everybody skips is a task with the wrong interval, and pretending otherwise turns the whole sheet into decoration.

The trap: booking gear out on the day it is due

This is the specific failure that comes from keeping the schedule and the bookings in two documents.

The projector is due for a filter clean on the 14th. On the 14th it is on a job, because the person booking it was looking at the calendar and the schedule lives in a spreadsheet. It gets pushed. Next month the same thing happens.

The fix on paper is to put the maintenance dates into the booking calendar as entries that block the item. Clumsy, and it works.

Where Itefy fits

The sheet above is a real answer and you can run a small team on it for years. Two things it cannot do, both of which are the reason schedules decay.

It cannot raise its hand. A next-due date in a spreadsheet is inert. In Itefy, maintenance recurs on a series with a reminder before each occurrence falls due, so the review is a prompt rather than a habit somebody has to remember to have.

It is not in the same place as the bookings. Itefy shows scheduled maintenance in the same calendar as reservations and checkouts, so the projector's filter clean is visible to whoever is about to book it for the 14th — which is the trap above, closed.

Each completed job goes onto the item's own history with its cost, so the schedule and the log stop being two documents that have to agree.

One honest limit: intervals are by date, not by usage hours, mileage or cycle counts. If your service plan is driven by a counter on the machine, Itefy will not read it — set a date interval that approximates it, or use something that does.

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Frequently Asked Questions

• Where do intervals come from?
  The manufacturer's manual first, for anything with a manual. The table below is a starting point for the things that do not have one, or whose manual assumes daily industrial use rather than eight jobs a year.
• What if we miss one?
  Do it, and write the actual date in "last done" rather than the date it should have happened. A schedule that records what you wish had happened is worse than no schedule, because you stop being able to tell which intervals are real.
• Should the schedule live with the bookings?
  Ideally yes. The specific failure this prevents is booking an item out on the day it is due for service, which is invisible if the schedule and the calendar are two different documents.

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