Legal maintenance: how it gets proven

Part of maintenance is not decided by the company: it is set by a regulation or by the equipment manufacturer. Electrical installations, fire protection, elevators, boiler rooms, water installations, pressure equipment, fluorinated gases.

The difference from the rest of maintenance is not in how it is done, but in the fact that it has to be provable. And that is where a system delivers what a spreadsheet cannot.

First, a clarification that saves time

In GMAO Cloud there is no legal maintenance module, and it is worth saying before anyone looks for it in the menu.

It runs on the general preventive maintenance mechanism: the inspection routine required by regulation is attached to the asset, its model, or an entire family, the frequency it mandates is defined, and the system generates work orders on its own.

It would be more convenient to sell a module. It is more honest to explain how it is achieved, and it also turns out to be more flexible: the same mechanism serves what the regulation requires, what the manufacturer requires, and what you have decided yourself.

It is worth not confusing this with the leak module for fluorinated gases, which does exist and is a different thing: it is corrective, it originates from a detected leak, and it logs how it was handled. The mandatory periodic maintenance of those same installations runs through the preventive route.

What counts as valid proof

This is the underlying question. Proof is not the memory that something was done: it is a record with four elements.

Date. When it was done, not when it was written down.

Author. Who did it, identified. And here is a detail that breaks everything else if it fails: if several people share one user account, the record stops identifying anyone. That is what happens when the software is billed per license and registering someone costs money. In GMAO Cloud, licenses are unlimited across all three plans, precisely so every job is recorded under the name of whoever did it.

What was checked. Not “inspection done,” but the specific points and their values.

Signature, when the process requires it.

Checklists, with values

A checklist of tick boxes says someone looked. One with a minimum and maximum value says what they saw, and logs any out-of-range reading as an anomaly at the moment it is taken.

In an inspection or after an incident, that difference is exactly what gets asked for. Checklists are defined with their fields and cascade down — asset, model, subfamily, family — so the routine required by regulation for a type of equipment is configured once and applied to all of that type.

And on preventive work orders, the app will not let you close it until the checklist is filled in, which is exactly the guarantee that matters.

Recording where it happens

A boiler room, an elevator pit, or a technical room are places without coverage. If the technician writes on paper and enters it in the afternoon, values come out rounded and the record date is not the inspection date.

The app stores work orders, assets, and documents on the device itself and queues every action taken offline, syncing it once signal is recovered. If one fails, it stays flagged with its reason instead of disappearing.

Documentation, the other half

The case file is not just work orders. It is inspection body certificates, inspection reports, manufacturer protocols, maintenance contracts, and insurance policies.

The document manager attaches them to the asset, the building, the client, the vendor, or the work order, decides who can see them, and gives them an expiry date. There is a daily check on what is about to expire that triggers the corresponding notification.

Certificates also carry their number, scope, issuer, holder, and hash, because a certificate is not just any PDF: it is proof that something was done in compliance with something.

That expiry notification is what avoids the problem that money cannot fix: an inspection that lapsed without anyone noticing.

Contractors

A good part of mandatory maintenance is carried out by a specialized company. If their work orders live in their own system, the owner has invoices but no case file.

Vendors are registered and receive the work orders that correspond to them, with their timing, material, documentation, and signature, so everything ends up in the same history. And the executed annual plan report answers the uncomfortable question: how many visits were scheduled and how many actually happened.

What no software can do

Said plainly, because this is an area where over-promising is constant.

No system guarantees compliance with a regulation. It does not certify, does not insure, and does not exempt. What it does is record and prove what was done, with its date and its author. The one who complies with the regulation is the company, and the one who answers to the inspection is also the company.

No system decides the frequency. That is set by the regulation, the manufacturer, or technical judgment. The software executes it.

No system replaces the inspection body where the regulation requires one.

Be wary of anyone telling you otherwise, even if it is comfortable to hear.

The obligations calendar

A practical problem almost every company has, and one that more willpower does not solve: obligations are not in one place — they are scattered across several people and several contracts.

The way to organize it is for each obligation to live attached to its asset. The inspection routine tied to the equipment, its model, or its family; the frequency mandated by regulation; and the corresponding certificate attached to that same asset with its expiry date.

From there, the obligations calendar does not need maintaining: it runs itself. Work orders are generated when due — checking beforehand whether the day is a holiday and whether the technician is available — and document expirations give notice before they are due.

Of everything a system does in this area, this is what brings the most peace of mind: it stops depending on someone remembering.

What to look at

The reports used here are three: executed annual plan, the one that gets shown; anomalies, which tells you whether inspections are looking where they should; and the work order log, which is the index of the case file.

Where to start

With the inventory of obligations: what equipment is subject to regulation, what each one requires, and how often. That work does not depend on the software and is what takes the longest.

With that done, loading routines and frequencies is a matter of days, and from the first month the case file writes itself. There is more detail on the legal maintenance page.

If you want to see it with your own facilities, you can request a demo.