Maintenance reports: which ones exist

Reporting is the part that gets promised the most and specified the worst when comparing maintenance software. Almost everyone says “customizable reports” and it’s hard to work out what that actually means.

So let’s get concrete: which reports exist in GMAO Cloud, what each group is for, and —what shapes the result the most— what you need to be logging so they don’t come out empty.

First things first: where the data comes from

A report doesn’t create information, it organizes it. If hours are jotted down from memory at the end of the day, the hours report will be a reconstruction; if materials are logged on Friday, the cost-per-asset figure will be incomplete.

That’s why what determines the quality of the analytics isn’t the reporting module: it’s whether the work order is closed out in the field, with the timer running inside the order itself, materials consumed recorded against the warehouse, and the checklist filled in. The technician app works without a signal precisely so that can happen in a basement.

Cost and profitability

The group that gets the most attention from management.

Cost per asset and equipment costs: how much it has cost to maintain each asset so far, adding up hours and materials. It’s the figure that lets you decide whether a machine gets repaired again or replaced, with the running total in front of you instead of a guess.

Costs overall and materials used on work orders: where the spend goes, and which parts actually move versus the ones that have sat on the shelf for two years tying up money.

Hours by client and cost allocations: the basis for knowing which contract is profitable. There are usually surprises.

Reliability and availability

MTBF and MTTR: mean time between failures and mean time to repair. The first measures reliability, the second response capacity. They’re two different things and shouldn’t be mixed up: something can be repaired very fast and still fail too often.

Downtime and intervention time per asset: translate the above into lost production or service, which is the language an investment gets justified in.

Anomalies: what’s detected during inspections. It’s the report that tells you whether the preventive plan is looking where things actually fail or not.

Plan and compliance

Annual preventive plan: what was scheduled versus what actually got done. In regulated sectors it’s the report you show, and the one that underpins legal maintenance along with the completed checklists and the documentation with its dates.

Order log and orders by month: volume and seasonality, which is what lets you size the team for the following year.

Staff and working hours

Hours by technician, non-productive hours, work shifts, absences, shift summary, and team lead summary.

A word of caution about these: they’re for sizing, budgeting, and distributing workload. Not for monitoring people. A team that senses the system exists to watch them stops feeding it accurate data, and at that point every other report stops being worth anything.

Assets and inventory

Inventory, asset movements, counters, and system QR codes: what exists, where it is, how it has moved, and with what readings.

Traceability and action log: who did what and when. It’s what turns the history into proof instead of a story.

Quality and diagnostics

Quality report, diagnostic report, and repair report: the detail of how something was resolved, useful when you need to justify an intervention or figure out why something keeps recurring.

Incidents by store and work orders by client: the per-site view, which in a multi-site network lets you see which stores concentrate the failures — almost never the ones you’d assume.

What “customized” means here

Worth being honest, because this is where the industry exaggerates the most.

Inside GMAO Cloud there’s a catalog of over sixty reports with filters and export, plus a dashboard. They filter by period, client, site, asset, technician, or status depending on the report, and they export.

What there isn’t is a visual dashboard builder inside the product itself, for dragging fields around and composing a new view. And in exchange there’s something that in practice handles that case better.

Connecting your own BI tool

If you already work with Power BI, Looker Studio, Tableau, Qlik, or anything else, there’s no need to rebuild your analytics inside the CMMS: it connects directly to the data.

There are two routes, and both are built for this:

Public REST API. The standard route for a new integration. It lets you read from the CMMS from your own development or from your tool’s web connector.

SQL access. A direct database connection, which is what BI tools usually want in order to work with volume and refresh on their own schedule.

Both are in the integrations catalog along with SOAP, CSV, and FTP for everything else.

The advantage of setting it up this way is that your maintenance dashboard can cross the CMMS data with production data, ERP data, or billing data — exactly what a report builder locked inside the product could never do. And the analytics live where your team already knows how to handle them.

Plain-language questions

There’s an additional route worth mentioning without overselling it. Among GMAO Cloud’s AI features is one that lets you ask about your numbers in plain language: orders, hours, and costs aggregated for whatever period you ask for, answered in a sentence instead of a table you have to interpret.

Two things matter more than the feature itself. First, it proposes, it doesn’t execute: it answers and suggests, it doesn’t close orders or modify anything. Second, every AI feature has its own switch and most come turned off by default, so turning it on is your decision. It’s covered in detail in AI in GMAO Cloud.

And the usual caveat: a question about an empty history has no answer. This doesn’t replace logging data, it relies on it.

The four I’d look at

With sixty reports it’s easy to look at none of them. If you have to pick:

Ratio of preventive to corrective hours. Better than any other report at describing whether the operation is proactive or reactive. It takes months to shift, and that’s exactly why it’s honest.

Cumulative cost per asset. The one that changes investment decisions.

Deviation between estimated and actual time. Almost always reveals a type of job that’s being budgeted below what it actually costs.

Annual plan executed. The check on whether the plan is actually followed or just drawn up.

How often to look at them

A daily report is almost never needed. What works is a quarterly one-hour review, with the four above in front of you, that produces concrete decisions: which frequencies to raise or lower, which assets have racked up a cost that no longer justifies repairing them, which equipment concentrates the anomalies, and which contracts need renegotiating.

It’s the first thing that disappears from the calendar once the day fills up with urgent work. Putting it on the calendar like any other task, with its own recurrence, is a dumb trick that works.

And a warning

A dashboard with thirty figures doesn’t get looked at. Four do. A report’s usefulness isn’t in how much data it shows, but in the specific decision it enables: repair or replace, raise or lower a frequency, renegotiate or keep a contract.

If you want to see the reports with data similar to yours, you can request a demo.