The planned maintenance system that keeps your customers compliant

A typical business running one of these has 6 to 20 engineers, one office, and somewhere between 1,500 and 6,000 sites under contract: housing providers, managing agents, schools, care homes and small commercial customers. It books 30 to 100 planned visits a day and issues a certificate for most of them. Whichever generation built the system, the due list and the certificates hang off it in the same way.

Day to day it holds each contract: its sites, what is covered, how often, the price and the renewal date. Under each site sit the assets: the boiler, the alarm panel, the extinguishers with their dates, the emergency lights. Each month the office runs the due list, books the visits, and the engineer goes out with a printed form. When it comes back the admin keys in the results, produces the certificate as a PDF and emails it. Sixty days before a certificate runs out a letter goes to the customer, often from a workbook kept beside the system. When a housing provider asks for its property list with dates, someone builds it in Excel on the provider's own references.

The rules it carries are the ones the trade runs on:

• A gas safety record issued in the two months before the due date keeps the original anniversary, so the date does not creep forward each year.
• Extinguishers get a basic service every year, and water-based and standard powder ones an extended service every fifth year (sealed powder ones every tenth), and the system knows which year each one is in.
• A housing provider's properties are reported on the provider's own reference, not the system's site number, and the mapping lives in the workbook.
• A visit that finds an appliance at risk raises a remedial job and a re-visit, and the certificate does not issue as satisfactory until the re-visit closes it.
• Access to a tenanted property is attempted three times, with a letter at each, before the customer is told, because that is what the contract says.

The compliance manager knows all of this. The system knows most of it, and the workbook holds the rest.

Started somewhere between 2005 and 2012 as a Microsoft Access database, built by the compliance manager of the day or a contractor, with the certificate layouts done in Crystal Reports so they looked like the paper forms the trade recognises. An Excel workbook grew up beside it for the reminder run and the month's due list, because the Access query took the morning and nobody trusted it. Some offices also have an SSRS report server that an IT firm added later for the customers who asked for reports. It all runs on the office PCs, with the Crystal runtime installed on each machine that prints certificates.

The person who built it has left, and the compliance manager who inherited it is the only one who understands the workbook. Layouts are not changed, because nobody has the tools or the nerve. It cannot be opened on site, the mail merge runs from one PC, and every certificate still starts life as a paper form.

The same contracts and certificates built between 2016 and 2022 by a freelancer or a small agency, as a web system in PHP or React, Angular or Node with the engineers' visit form in React Native, or put together in Zoho Creator or Power Apps by a compliance manager who wanted rid of the workbook. The engineer fills in the form on a tablet, the certificate issues as a PDF, and the reminders go out by email on their own.

The dates are the trouble. The anniversary rule and the fifth-year extinguisher service were coded as the freelancer understood them, and the one change made since pushed a batch of gas safety anniversaries forward a year before anyone noticed. The date rules have been left exactly as they are ever since, and the freelancer, now salaried elsewhere, answers questions as a favour. From 2023 a few compliance managers tried again in an AI app builder, and most of those stalled once the housing providers' own property references had to be matched. A decade younger than the Access database, and stranded on the same due list.

Nothing under contract falls out of date without someone knowing.

The due list is the reason the certificates get done in time. Every site has a next-due date, the month's visits are booked from it, and the office can see in September what October looks like. The certificate that goes out has the engineer's registration and the appliance's details filled in from the record, and it looks like the certificate the customer's auditor expects.

That record is what answers the questions. When a housing provider's compliance officer, an insurer or an accreditation body asks which properties were visited, when, and by whom, the answer is on the screen. The asset register, with the model, serial and age of every appliance, is what makes a remedial quote a ten-minute job. And because every contract carries a renewal date and a price, the year's income is visible a year ahead.

The system still works. The trouble is what has grown around it.

There are two lists, and they disagree. The reminder run and the due list moved into a spreadsheet years ago. Now the compliance manager reconciles the workbook against the system by hand before the month's letters go out, and the housing providers' property references live only in the workbook. When the compliance manager is on leave, the reminders wait.

The certificates only print on some PCs. The layouts are Crystal Reports tied to a runtime years out of support, which the IT company coaxed onto new machines when Windows 10 support ended in October 2025. On two of the PCs it will not print, so the admin emails the visit to a colleague. The next refresh is the one where it stops.

The audit asked for what it cannot show. Social housing now has electrical safety checks at least every five years, and Awaab's Law, in force for social landlords since 27 October 2025, sets fixed timescales for investigating and fixing hazards such as damp and mould. So a housing provider's audit of its contractors asks for inspection dates by property, response times, the overdue list with the reason for each, and evidence of the access attempts. Whichever generation the system is, it has the dates. The reasons and the response times sit in a spreadsheet, in emails and in the compliance manager's memory, and the answer takes a week.

One person holds it together. The queries, the workbook's formulas and the way a re-visit gets closed are known to the compliance manager and nobody else. The last two people hired into the office took months to learn it, and there is no manual.

One due list, with the reminders, the certificates and the customers' audits all coming off it.

One due list, and no workbook. The anniversary rule, the fifth-year service and the access attempts go into the system as rules, the workbook's columns become fields, and the reminders come off the same list the diary is booked from.

Reminders that send themselves. Sixty days out, thirty days out, and the access-attempt letters, by email or post, each logged against the property. Nobody runs a mail merge.

The certificate from the visit record. The engineer's results, entered on site, produce the certificate as a PDF the moment the visit closes, with the registration and the appliance details on it. It looks the same as the Crystal one, prints on any PC, and the customer has it the same day.

The customer's compliance position on a login. A housing provider or a managing agent sees its properties, the certificate on each, the overdue ones and the reason: no access, second letter sent, remedial pending. Each remedial shows when it was reported and when it was closed, which is the response-time evidence their audit now asks for.

Remedial work quoted from the register. With the model, the serial and the age on the record, the quote for the defect the engineer found is drafted at the contract's rates while the engineer is still on site.

Written down and shared. The rules the compliance manager carries come out into screens and a short manual, so the office can run a month without them.

The old screens stay open through all of it, Access or browser. New pieces are added on the same data; nothing is switched off.

Check every certificate before it leaves, read the paper history into the register, and answer the questions the reports were never built for.

On a certificates system AI is useful with the records, not the forecasts. Three places:

Each certificate checked before it issues. Results come back with a serial that does not match the record, a reading outside its range, or a visit date that would move the anniversary. AI compares each certificate with the asset record and the rules the system already holds, and flags the ones that look wrong. At 30 to 100 certificates a day and a couple of minutes reading each, the admin's checking typically shrinks from most of a morning to the handful flagged.

The filing cabinet read into the asset register. Years of certificates sit as scans and paper forms, and the register has gaps: a boiler with no serial, an extinguisher with no install year. AI reads the scans, pulls out the model, the serial, the dates and the readings, and proposes each against the right property and asset for the admin to accept or correct. Every remedial quote that needed a serial from the cabinet stops needing the trip, which across a few remedials a day typically adds up to several hours a week.

Questions put to the records. Which of one provider's properties have a remedial still open, and for how long? Which have had two no-access visits and no second letter logged? AI answers in plain words from the visits and letters on file, and lists each record behind the answer for the compliance manager to check. A question that took a morning of filtering takes minutes.

Not worth doing: predicting which boilers will fail from a few thousand visit records. The engineers' judgement and the manufacturer's age guidance do better.

All three need records that can be changed without upsetting the due list, and making that safe is the first stage. The assessment maps where AI would pay back on the system as it stands.

The workbook first, then the paper, then the customers, with the Access screens as the fallback until the office chooses to close them.

1. Stabilise, and rescue the workbook. The source of the Access application and the Crystal layouts found, or the agency's code recovered, the data off the Access file and onto a supported database if it is still in one, a backup that has been restored, and the workbook's columns and rules captured into the database so there is one due list. It goes first because every stage after it reads from that list, and the workbook is the biggest risk in the office.
2. Reminders from the system. Off the same list, logged against the property.
3. The certificate from the visit record. The engineer enters results on site, the certificate issues on the spot, and the Crystal runtime is retired PC by PC.
4. The customer login. The compliance position for each housing provider and managing agent, on their own references.
5. Remedial quoting from the register. Priced on its own, once the register is complete.
6. Retire the Access screens and the workbook when nothing depends on them. The last thing to go is usually a customer report somebody built in SSRS.

The assessment is from £395 + VAT, sized on a free one-hour consultation, with an exact price before you commit. For a certificates system that means a few days with the compliance manager and the workbook, finding the rules and the risks, and a report with costed options and a fixed price for each. Each stage after that is priced before you commit to it. How we work, what drives the price and the payment terms each have a page, and so does each technology the system is built on: Microsoft Access, Excel to a system, Crystal Reports and SSRS, and for the newer generation old PHP, React, Angular and Node and the engineers' visit form in React Native.