An equipment maintenance log your crew can keep up with

What a log needs to answer

When something needs service or breaks, someone asks the same questions:

• Which machine? The name your crew uses for it, plus the make, model and serial number.
• How is its use measured? Hours, miles, kilometres, or the calendar for equipment with no meter.
• What service does it need, and how often? Take each interval from the manufacturer's manual for that machine, and adjust for your operating conditions where the manual says to.
• What was done last, and at what reading or date?
• What is due next, and at what reading or date?

A log that answers those five questions for every machine is doing its job. Cost, parts and notes help, but the reading or date at the time of service is the part that is hardest to reconstruct later.

Record each service at the actual reading

Write down the meter reading or date when the work was actually done, not when it was scheduled. If a fictional mower due at 1,750 hours was serviced at 1,768 hours, record 1,768. Its next interval counts from there.

A spreadsheet layout you can set up yourself

One row per service item per machine works for a small fleet. The same machine name repeats on every row for that machine; each machine-plus-service pair appears once.

Keep the unit on every row so 250 hours is never mistaken for 250 miles. For calendar rows, next due is the last date plus the interval counted in days: a week is 7, a month is 30, a year is 365.

Where a shared spreadsheet usually struggles

• Readings fall behind. If the sheet lives on one computer, the reading taken out in the yard often doesn't make it in.
• "What's due?" depends on formulas. Each row needs the right formula for its unit, and an edit can break one without anyone noticing.
• History becomes a column. It gets hard to see, for one machine, everything that was done and at what reading.

None of that means a spreadsheet is wrong. For a few machines and one careful person it can be enough.

Keeping the same information in FleetTend

The same facts, organised around each machine:

• One record per machine: name, make, model, serial and how it is tracked (hours, miles, kilometres or calendar).
• Maintenance schedules by meter or calendar. Save an hour, mile or kilometre reading to see how much service is left; calendar schedules follow their dates.
• Work orders with tasks, notes and labor, and an optional photo on the work order.
• Recorded completion. Completing a maintenance task linked to a schedule records the completion date and the actual meter reading. Closing the work order is a separate step.
• A printed QR label opens the machine's record for a signed-in teammate using a phone's browser.
• History stays with the machine. Workspace owners can download a ZIP of CSVs from Settings → Your data. Photo and manual files are not included.

Plans

• Free: up to 250 machines, 10 active teammates and 10 active maintenance schedules. On Free, closed work orders older than 90 days become read-only; they stay visible and exportable. No card required.
• Shop: $49/month or $490/year per workspace. It adds parts inventory, manual indexing and search, unlimited active maintenance schedules and editable older work-order history.