Part 3 — Run Your Operation · Chapter 20

Assets & Recurring Maintenance

This is the recurring-revenue chapter. An asset is a piece of equipment you service, a panel or an emergency light or a generator, registered at a customer site and accumulating its own history. Asset Scheduling generates the recurring maintenance work orders for those assets on its own, which turns “we should really call Harbor Grill about this year’s inspections” into work orders that appear on time, every time, per contract.

Asset management is a licensed capability. If your BigWave includes it, Asset Types appears under Home/Manage.

Asset types

An asset type is the class: Electrical Panel, Emergency Lighting Unit, Generator. The type defines what its assets carry, and it’s a full configuration surface of its own:

  • Custom Fields for the data this equipment has. Amperage, Breaker Count, Battery Date.
  • Statuses for the asset lifecycle. In Service, Needs Repair, Retired.
  • Standard Documents, meaning deliverables an asset should have on file, like a commissioning report.
  • Document Folders, Workflow Types that can ride these assets, and an Import / Export Center for bulk-loading them.
  • Show On Resource Calendar, which decides whether assets of this type are assignable as dispatch resources. The bucket truck yes, the customer’s panel no. This flag is about chapter 16’s calendar, not about maintenance.

Assets

Individual assets register at customer sites, from the site’s Assets panel or by import. Each asset record carries its details and custom field values, its documents, and three histories: location history, because assets move, work order history, every job that touched it, and assignment history. Work orders link to the assets they service (chapter 15), and that’s what builds the per-asset story. When a Harbor Grill panel fails inspection twice in three years, its record says so, and the replacement quote writes itself.

Commercial (Harbor Grill): each of the twelve sites registers its panels and emergency lighting, imported from a spreadsheet during onboarding using chapter 22’s machinery, including generate-style imports that create assets in bulk from site data. Serial numbers, amperage and install dates ride as custom fields.

Residential (the Okafors): the new 200A panel gets registered as an asset at their site when Tom closes the upgrade job. Homeowners rarely need asset tracking, but a panel Beacon installed is a panel Beacon will service for twenty years, and its history starts now. Selling the Okafors an annual check later is one schedule away.

The scheduling engine

Each project’s Setup has an Asset Scheduling panel where the recurrence is defined. Which assets, how often (weekly, monthly, quarterly, twice a year or annually), anchored to the asset’s last service or in-service date, with optional day-of-week restrictions such as Mondays only for sites that close Mondays. From then on the engine generates the maintenance work orders on cadence, inside the project, from the work order template you gave it, ready for chapter 16’s dispatch like any other job.

Per asset, an eligible for scheduling flag pauses and resumes the engine. Pausing doesn’t hide or retire the asset, which stays in grids, reports and history. It stops generating work while a site is under renovation. Re-enable and the schedule resumes where it left off.

Worth saying plainly: the contract that took chapter 9’s twenty minutes to set up now produces its year of work orders with nobody creating anything. The missed-date alerts (chapter 13) and Scheduled Events views (chapter 16) then make sure the generated work actually happens. That’s a maintenance contract running on rails.

Inventory, in passing

Companies that stock parts get inventory features: the Inventory screen’s search across stocked materials, and its own import and export. It connects to the materials database (chapter 11) and supplier purchasing (chapter 21). If you don’t hold stock, skip it.

Checklist

  1. Define asset types for equipment you service repeatedly, not everything you’ve ever touched.
  2. Put real data in type custom fields. The engine schedules the asset, but the tech services the 200A Square D in the back hallway.
  3. Import assets during customer onboarding, while the customer’s equipment list is fresh and on offer.
  4. Anchor schedules to last-service dates for drift-free cadence, and set day restrictions before the first generation, not after a Monday no-show.
  5. Use the eligibility flag for pauses, never deletion. History is the asset’s value.