You start by setting up all of the items that you want to track maintenance
and expenses information on. For example, the water heater, furnace,
air conditioning unit. You can set up multiple maintenance activities
for each item. For example, your furnace needs to have a filter
replaced every 30 days, and a annual inspection. You can also set up
inspection activities for all the systems in your house, not just the
mechanicals.
Next, you define the maintenance activities that need to be performed for
each of the items you set up above. In the screen below, the Day
Interval is the number of days between performing the maintenance operation.
For example, if you were setting up a maintenance activity to replace the
furnace filter every 30 days, you would put 30 in the days interval field.
Once you have performed the maintenance activity, you can enter information
about it into the history file. This file keep tracks of all the
maintenance operations you perform. The options under Type of Work
are:
Scheduled: This was a scheduled maintenance operation
Repair: This was a emergency, or non-scheduled repair.
Upgrade: This is an enhancement to an existing item.
The Data Entry menu options:
The Reports menu options:
Use the summary cost report to see if it is time to replace an item that you
are spending a lot of money to maintain. For example, if the summary
cost report says that the water heater cost 375.00, and you have spent
600.00 in maintenance, perhaps it is time to replace the unit rather than
spending more on maintenance.
