See maintenance costs

Maintenance → Costs adds up the labor and materials on your work orders. Use it to see how much your maintenance cost, how much of it was planned work, which machines cost most to keep running, and which activities cost most.

You need View maintenance to open Costs. The amounts need See cost figures. With Access by location on, you see only the work orders for assets in your locations.

Choose the period

One period controls all of the page: every maintenance tile on it shows this period, also on a customized page. Costs opens on Last 6 months. To change it, select the period button, then select This month, Last month, Last 3 months, Last 6 months or Last 12 months. For other dates, select Custom Date Range, pick the first and the last day, then select Apply. A period can be up to 366 days.

The presets use the days of your organization's time zone. This month and the Last … months presets start on the first day of a month and stop today.

A work order counts in the period by the day it was finished (completed) in your organization's time zone. All its labor and materials count on that day, even when the work went on for longer. A work order that is not finished is in no period. It counts in Open work orders.

Next to the period, the page shows the previous period. The page compares the figures with it. The previous period has the same length: for Last 6 months from 1 May to 30 October, it is 1 November to 30 April.

Read the insight

Under the chart, one sentence tells you which activity had the largest part of your unplanned spend, for example: "Repair was 41% of unplanned spend this period ($139,200 of $339,600)". It uses the same figures as the Unplanned spend tile. Pay makes this sentence from the period's work orders with a fixed rule. It is not an AI answer.

Without See cost figures, the sentence counts work orders, for example: "Repair was on 6 of 14 unplanned work orders this period (43%)". When the period has no unplanned work, it reads "There is no unplanned work to show in this period".

Read the figures

The four tiles at the top show these figures. The name of each figure is at the top of its tile:

• Maintenance spend: the cost of the work orders finished in the period.
• Planned share: the part of that cost that was planned work. The bar shows the share. The line on the bar is the target of 80%.
• Unplanned spend: the cost of the unplanned work, and its part of all the spend.
• Open work orders: how many work orders are open today, and how many of them are overdue. A work order is overdue when its target end has passed.

The colored label on a tile shows the change from the previous period. For cost, a decrease is green and an increase is amber. For the planned share, an increase is green. The planned share changes in percentage points (pts).

Select a tile's figure to open the Work orders list. Maintenance spend, Planned share and Unplanned spend open the work orders finished in the period. Open work orders opens the list without a filter.

Read the chart and the top assets

Maintenance cost by month shows each month of the period as one bar. The blue part is planned work and the orange part is unplanned work. A grey part between them is other activities on mixed work orders, shown only when a month has some. Hover over a bar to see its figures. The 80% target for planned work is on the Planned share tile. A work order counts in the month it was finished.

Assets that cost most shows the 5 assets that cost most in the period. Each row shows the cost, and the part of it that was unplanned work. The label is amber when unplanned work is 50% or more. Select View to see the work orders of that asset.

Select All … assets to see all the assets. The Maintenance cost breakdown tile changes to Group by Asset, and the page moves down to it. If your dashboard has no breakdown tile, All … assets opens the Work orders list for the period.

Read the breakdown

Maintenance cost breakdown is one table. To change how it groups the work orders, select one of these in Group by:

• Activity (the default): by the activities of the work orders, such as PM service, Repair or Hydraulics.
• Planned and unplanned: planned work against unplanned work.
• Cause: by the cause of each activity. An activity without a cause shows as No cause.
• Asset: each machine, the most costly first.
• Project: by the project that the machine was allocated to when the fault was reported. See Group by project.

Each row shows the number of Work orders, their Labor, Materials, Total and Hours, and its Share of spend. Without See cost figures, the last column is Share of work orders. When you group by Activity, Cause or Project, the Type column shows Planned, Unplanned or Mixed. The last row is the total. When you group by Activity or Asset, select a row's name to open the Work orders list with those work orders.

The costs of each activity on a work order count in the row of that activity, so the costs always add up to the total. Work orders counts each work order one time in a row and one time in the total. A work order with a planned activity and an unplanned activity is in the Planned row and in the Unplanned row. So these two counts can add up to more than the total.

A mechanic can record a timesheet against an activity that is not on the work order. Its cost shows in an Other activities row. This row has no Planned or Unplanned, so it counts in the totals only. On the chart, it is a separate part of the bar, named Other activities.

Group by project

The project of a work order is the project that the machine was allocated to on the day the fault was reported. Pay finds it from the requests of the work order. A work order without a project shows as No project. A work order whose requests have different projects shows as Several projects. If you cannot see the project, it shows as Project hidden. All the work orders with a project that you cannot see are in one Project hidden row.

This grouping is for review only. It does not charge the cost to the project. The cost stays on the work order.

To get each activity of a work order as a row, select Download CSV next to the period. The file has the work orders finished in the period, the same work orders as the page totals. Open work orders are not in the file. Its columns are Number, Title, Asset, Activity, Planned, Cause, Project, Finished, Labor, Materials, Total, Hours and Note. The Project column uses the same names as the breakdown. The CSV has the same hidden figures as the page.

If no work orders were finished in the period, each cost tile shows that it has no costs for the period. Open work orders and the other tiles show as usual. If you customized the page and it has only cost tiles, the page shows No maintenance costs in this period in place of the tiles. Select a longer period, or select Open work orders.

Customize the page

The Costs page is a dashboard. It opens with the default layout that this page describes. You can change the tiles, their size and their order, and add tiles from other areas, for example a chart of your timesheets.

You need View finance reports to customize the page, because it lets you edit dashboards. Without it, you do not see Customize.

1. Select Customize. Pay makes a copy of the default layout as the dashboard Maintenance costs, then opens it in Reports → Dashboards.
2. Add, move, resize or remove tiles.
3. Go back to Maintenance → Costs. The page now shows your dashboard.

The dashboard is for all of your organization. When you change it, all members see the change on Costs. Each member still sees only the figures that their permissions let them see.

On a customized page, select Edit board to open the dashboard again. To go back to the default layout, select Reset to default, then select Reset. This deletes the customized dashboard for all members. It also stops the scheduled emails of that dashboard and turns off its shared link.

If you delete the Maintenance costs dashboard in Reports → Dashboards, the page also goes back to the default layout.

On a customized page, each maintenance tile shows the period that you select on Costs. On the dashboard in Reports → Dashboards, each maintenance tile shows the period in its settings. The default is Last 6 months.

Shared and emailed dashboards

The maintenance tiles show only to a person who is signed in to Pay. Pay calculates the figures for that person and hides what that person must not see. A shared link, a printed dashboard or a scheduled email has no signed-in person, so the maintenance tiles on it show Not available in shared or emailed views. The other tiles on that dashboard show as usual.

When figures are hidden

Without See cost figures, the amounts show as hidden. The counts and hours still show. The planned share, the chart, the top assets and the insight then use the number of work orders, not the cost. The chart then says Work orders by month, and the top assets say by work orders.

With See cost figures but not See per-worker cost, Pay hides the labor and the total of each activity on a work order whose labor is from one worker, because that figure would show their pay. Materials, hours and counts still show: materials are never anyone's pay, so every Materials figure in the breakdown adds the materials of hidden activities too. Each activity is checked separately, so a work order can have some activities shown and some hidden. The hidden labor and totals are left out of every total, share and chart, and show as 1 withheld, 2 withheld and so on. Pay also hides the total of a work order when the activities that show would let you work out what one worker is paid. So no total, and no difference between two totals, can show what one worker is paid.