Planned preventive maintenance and service charge management: one set of facts

Two budgets sit at the centre of most building operations teams, and they are usually argued about separately. One is planned preventive maintenance: what gets serviced, how often, and what it costs to keep plant and fabric working. The other is the service charge: what the occupiers are asked to pay, and what evidence supports each line of it.

They are the same money. A boiler service is a maintenance job on Monday and a service charge line in the year-end statement. When the two are managed in different systems, the join is done by hand, late, and from memory — which is where disputes begin.

What planned preventive maintenance is actually buying

Planned preventive maintenance (PPM) is work scheduled before failure rather than after it. In practice a PPM regime is built from three things:

• An asset register. What plant exists, where it is, what it is, and when it was installed. Without this the schedule is guesswork.
• A service frequency for each asset. Some frequencies are statutory, some come from the manufacturer, some are a house rule. These are not the same thing and should not be recorded as if they were.
• Evidence that the visit happened. A date, an engineer, a sheet, a photograph, a reading.

A schedule on its own proves intent. Only the third item proves anything else. Software that shows a tidy green calendar without attached evidence is showing you a plan, not a record.

Where service charge management meets it

A service charge is recoverable when three questions can be answered for every line:

1. Which building or unit does this cost belong to? Costs shared across a portfolio have to be apportioned on a stated basis, and the basis has to be the same one the lease describes.
2. Which lease clause permits it? Recoverability is a contractual question, not an accounting one.
3. What proves the work was done? The job record, the invoice, and the evidence from the visit.

Every one of those answers already exists in a working PPM system. The reason service charge disputes take months is usually not that the answers are unknown — it is that they live in a maintenance system, a finance ledger and a filing cabinet that were never joined.

What to ask a supplier

When you are comparing planned preventive maintenance software or service charge management software, the demonstrations tend to look alike. These questions separate them:

• Can I open a service charge line and see the job, the visit evidence and the invoice behind it, in one movement? If the answer involves exporting a report, the join is still manual.
• What does a blank field mean? A system that treats a missing meter reading or a missing certificate as zero will quietly understate your exposure. Unknown and nil are different facts.
• How is apportionment recorded? A percentage with no stated basis is a number somebody typed.
• Does a completed job mean the work was done, or that somebody ticked a box? Both are legitimate records. They should not look identical on screen.
• What happens at year end? Reconciliation should be a matter of reading what is already recorded, not rebuilding it.
• Who can change a historic record, and is the change visible afterwards? Auditors ask this. It is cheaper to answer before they do.

A realistic sequence

Teams that get this working rarely start with the service charge. They start with the register, because everything else is derived from it:

1. Get the asset register honest. Include the assets you are unsure about, marked as unsure. An incomplete register that says so is more useful than a complete-looking one that does not.
2. Attach frequencies with their source. Statutory, manufacturer, or local policy — recorded separately, so a change in one does not silently rewrite another.
3. Insist on evidence at the point of work. Captured on site, on a phone, at the time. Evidence collected afterwards is testimony.
4. Map cost lines to leases once. Then reconciliation is reading, not reconstruction.
5. Reconcile monthly rather than annually. The gap between the two is where a year of small errors compounds into a dispute.

The measurable outcome

The gain from joining planned preventive maintenance to service charge management is not usually a lower maintenance spend. It is a shorter defence. When an occupier queries a line, the answer takes minutes instead of a fortnight of file retrieval, and the answer is the same one every time it is asked.

That is worth more than it sounds. Service charge disputes are expensive not because of the sums in dispute, but because of the time senior people spend assembling evidence that should have been assembled as the work happened.

Related reading: service charge management and service charge accounting that can be audited.