If your business maintains equipment inventory, it understands the importance of tracking maintenance on these assets. From scheduling preventive maintenance to recording emergency repairs, keeping records of the service performed on your assets is essential. By adequately tracking equipment maintenance, your business will better understand its assets’ lifecycles and extend each piece of equipment’s useful life by keeping better tabs on key maintenance dates.
This article will reveal how to keep track of equipment maintenance in three general steps. We’ll also provide a free, downloadable equipment maintenance log that’s yours to customize. This log can be used to track equipment maintenance right away but is best used in conjunction with software that provides a digital record of past service—and reminds you when key dates are around the corner, too.
Step 1: Organize all equipment
The first step to keeping track of equipment maintenance is organizing all the equipment in your business’s inventory. By putting together a robust, detailed inventory list of every asset your business owns, your team can visualize all its equipment, understand where it’s located, what condition it’s in, who’s responsible for managing it, and what maintenance schedule that asset requires.
Whether your business owns just a few pieces of equipment that all remain in one location or maintains thousands of pieces of equipment in a constant state of flux, getting organized is a can’t-miss step. To simplify the process, select an inventory management system that works for your business. Decide between a manual inventory list, an equipment spreadsheet, or inventory management software.
Remember that inventory management software offers key automation features like barcode and QR code scanning, maintenance alerts and reminders, and the ability to store photos, attachments, and other essential documentation. Most businesses that manage more than a few pieces of equipment find that they save time, money, and stress with the right inventory app.
No matter which inventory management system your team selects, you’ll want to put together an exhaustive list of equipment carefully. After all, this database will be the foundation for your company’s equipment maintenance strategy, affect your business’s balance sheet and depreciation claims, and determine how your business divvies up key resources.
If your business’s equipment is physically disorganized, you’ll also want to take this time to organize it properly.
Step 2: Tag equipment properly
As your business administratively and physically organizes its equipment inventory, it should also decide how to “tag” or “label” that inventory. This process, also known as asset tagging, will allow your business to affix a physical identifier to each piece of equipment in its inventory.
Suppose you’ve decided to use inventory management software like Sortly. In that case, you can generate, customize, and print barcode and QR code labels that sync directly to each piece of equipment’s profile and unique Sortly ID. You can also add other key item details—including the item value, condition, and maintenance history—to the item’s profile.
If you manage equipment maintenance manually or with a spreadsheet, you’ll need to create asset tags by hand.
No matter how your business manages its equipment inventory, commit to organizing, identifying, and tagging each piece of equipment on your business’s list of assets.
Related: What is the best barcode generator?
Step 3: Keep track of every date
Now that your equipment is organized and clearly identified, it’s time to track every bit of maintenance performed on your business’s assets. You can record this information the same way you record all other inventory details: on a sheet of paper, on a spreadsheet, or with the help of software or an app.
If you’ve decided to use an inventory app like Sortly, you can effortlessly track equipment maintenance within your inventory database. Simply scan the barcodes and QR codes synced to each item to rapidly learn more about an item, update an item’s condition, record or investigate a maintenance event, view the upcoming maintenance schedule, and much more. These barcodes and QR codes can be scanned within the Sortly app using a smartphone or tablet or with a synced, external handheld Bluetooth scanner.
You can also use Sortly to set reminders and alerts for key upcoming maintenance dates. Plus, you can customize when the notifications are sent, who receives them, and whether those recipients receive these alerts within the Sortly app, via email, or both.
If you use a manual asset tagging system to identify equipment, you’ll need to carve out additional time to track equipment maintenance. Remember that whenever your business wants more information about equipment, your employees will need to physically audit each equipment tag. Even if you maintain an excellent equipment maintenance log, your team may want to crosscheck records with details logged directly on a hang tag.
While this is a traditional way to keep an eye on equipment maintenance, it’s not scalable. If your business wants to manage more equipment maintenance in less time, look for an inventory app that can aggregate customized, detail-rich reports about equipment maintenance, asset condition, value, location, and more with the click of a button.
Free equipment maintenance log
Suppose you’re not ready to use an inventory app to streamline your equipment maintenance strategy quite yet. In that case, Sortly’s free, downloadable equipment maintenance log can still help you get organized and track past and future maintenance events.
Experience the simplest inventory management software.
About Sortly
Sortly is a top-rated inventory management app that helps businesses track inventory and assets—including equipment. With key automation features like barcode and QR code scanning, low stock alerts, upcoming maintenance date reminders, customizable reporting, and the ability to rapidly track thousands of items across multiple locations with a few simple swipes, more and more businesses are turning to Sortly to take control of their business’s assets.
Curious whether Sortly is the right fit for your equipment maintenance strategy? Start a free, two-week trial of our most powerful features today.
