Schedule preventive maintenance

Make a maintenance job repeat on a fixed calendar, and make it land on the right shift.

Before you start. You need a work order with a due date, from Create a maintenance work order. Set your organization timezone first, in Shifts and timezone, so a rule can be pinned to the plant instead of to whoever wrote it.

1. There is no separate PM object

A recurrence is a rule stored on a work order that says when the job comes back: a pattern, an interval, and an optional end. Each date the rule produces is an occurrence. The work order's due date is the first one, and every later occurrence is counted from it.

A PM, a preventive maintenance job, is that rule and nothing else. There is no PM record, no PM list and no PM permission: a quarterly gearbox inspection is a work order carrying Monthly on the first Tuesday.

That is the payoff, because anything you can do to a work order you can do to a PM: reassign it, attach the last technician's photograph, change its parts, export it. See Update, discuss, and close a work order.

One path cannot make a PM. A request raised from the Maintenance panel in the job runner is submitted with its recurrence fields empty, so nobody creates a schedule by accident from the floor. See Submit a maintenance request.

2. Add a recurrence rule

The same picker appears in two places.

In the create modal, from the board at /<organization>/maintenance:

1. Set a due date on the Due Date chip. This is the first occurrence.
2. Select the Recurrence chip.
3. Pick a pattern, or Custom for anything the list does not cover.
4. Create the work order. The chip reads Recurring until you do.

Selecting Recurrence before there is a due date raises Set a due date first, because the series has nothing to count from.

In the work-order drawer, on a work order that already exists:

1. Open the work order from the board. The URL gains ?selected_wo=.
2. In Properties, select the Recurrence row. It reads Add recurrence while the work order has no rule.
3. Pick a pattern, then select Save. This row is the one exception to the drawer's save-on-change behavior.

The two pickers hold the same controls under shorter labels in the drawer: End Recurrence is Ends there, and Time Zone is Timezone. The field names below are the create modal's.

The Recurrence picker with a weekly pattern being set, showing the pattern control (1), the weekday row (2), and the interval (3). A work order carrying one of these is a preventive maintenance schedule; there is no separate PM object.

3. Daily, weekly, monthly, annual

The pattern list is built from the due date, so its wording changes with the date you picked. A work order due Tuesday, October 6, 2026 offers these.

Monthly patterns repeat by weekday, not by date. A due date that is the last Tuesday of its month also offers Monthly on the last Tuesday, which is what you want for a job that has to happen before a month closes rather than on the 27th.

The picker previews Next 3 occurrences under the list so you can check a rule before saving it. The preview covers the daily, weekday, weekly and annual patterns; several of the monthly ones show none, so read the rule's own wording there.

4. Intervals

Every preset runs at an interval of one. To run a job every second week or every third month, pick Custom, set Frequency, then set Repeat every to the number you want. A rule set to Weekly, repeat every 6 weeks on a Tuesday lands on Oct 6, Nov 17 and Dec 29.

Daily has no interval field in either picker. A rule that skips days is a weekly rule with the right days selected, not a daily rule with an interval.

5. Weekday sets

A custom weekly rule carries a row of day pills, and it can land on more than one day. Select Mon, Wed and Fri and one rule covers a three-times-a-week greasing round, rather than three work orders that drift apart the first time somebody edits one.

The pill for the due date's own weekday is selected when the panel opens — in the create modal, the pill for the day before it, as Daily, weekly, monthly, annual describes. Keep at least one selected, or the rule has no day to land on. The pills are inert on the daily, monthly and yearly frequencies.

6. End date

End Recurrence is Never until you change it. Set it to On a Specific Date and a date and a time appear, already filled in: thirteen weeks past the due date, at 9:00 AM. That is a default, not a reading of your due time — a work order due at 8:00 AM still ends at 9:00. Change both to the date and time the series should stop. The calendar will not offer a date before the due date, and the time is a dropdown of half hours.

The end-date field in the recurrence panel with a date and a time set. An end date stops the recurrence, and a rule that produced no next occurrence usually hit this.

Give a rule an end date when the work has a horizon: a warranty inspection for the first year, a weekly check while a machine is on watch after a rebuild. Leave it at Never for standing maintenance, and stop it by hand when the machine is retired.

A recurring work order that stopped producing a next occurrence has almost always hit its end date. Open the rule and read the date before looking anywhere else.

7. Choose the timezone

The date and time you type are read as wall-clock time in the timezone you select, then stored in UTC. Time Zone offers Local Timezone, the browser's own zone, Organization Timezone, the one set in Shifts and timezone, and Custom Timezone, any zone from the list. It is one setting covering both the due time and the end date, but it is easy to miss, because neither picker shows it until something else is set. In the create modal it appears at the bottom of the custom recurrence panel only once End Recurrence is On a Specific Date; in the drawer it sits in the Due Date dialog, labelled with the zone it currently resolves to rather than the word Timezone. Select that label to open the choice.

Set this to the plant's timezone, not the planner's. A weekly PM authored from a different timezone lands on the wrong shift, and it does it every week without anyone noticing which week it started. Choose Organization Timezone for a single-site organization, and Custom Timezone when you are planning work for a plant in a region other than your own.

The Time Zone selector in the recurrence panel, set to Local Timezone, with the zone it resolves to shown beside it. Its three choices are Local Timezone, Organization Timezone, and Custom Timezone. Set this to the plant's timezone, not the planner's.

A planner in Detroit writing an 8:00 AM Tuesday PM for a plant in Phoenix, with Local Timezone left alone, stores it at 12:00 UTC. That is 5:00 AM in Phoenix, three hours before first shift. It is worse than a constant error: Phoenix does not observe daylight saving, so the same rule slips to 6:00 AM in November and back again in March.

How a recurrence rule generates occurrences, and what happens when the rule's timezone is not the plant's.A diagram in two bands. The top band, headed a rule and the occurrences it makes, starts with a box reading: The rule, weekly on Tuesday, ends Nov 3. An arrow runs right into a strip of eight date cells. The first five, Oct 6, Oct 13, Oct 20, Oct 27 and Nov 3, are solid and each carries a violet dot, labeled below: one dot, one occurrence. A violet vertical line falls between Nov 3 and Nov 10, labeled end date, nothing after this, and the last three cells, Nov 10, Nov 17 and Nov 24, are drawn as empty dashed outlines. The second band, headed the same 8:00 AM on Oct 6 in two timezones, holds two rows of three boxes. The first row reads: Timezone Phoenix, the plant; arrow; Stored 15:00 UTC; arrow; 8:00 AM on the floor, the start of first shift. The second row reads: Timezone Detroit, the planner; arrow; Stored 12:00 UTC; arrow; 5:00 AM on the floor, three hours before the shift. A line across the bottom reads: the time you type is read in the timezone you pick, then stored as UTC.

8. Edit a recurring work order

A recurring work order edits like any other. Properties shows the live rule in its Recurrence row, written out as a sentence, for example Repeats every week on Tuesday until 12/22/2026. Select the row to change it: the panel opens on the current rule, and Save writes the new one.

Changing the due date moves the whole series, because the pattern is anchored to it. Move a Tuesday PM to Wednesday and every future occurrence moves with it. A failed date change reads Issues updating due date, and the value in the drawer reverts.

A work order with no due date can still be given a rule from the drawer. Saving one sets the due date to today at the work order's due time, or 9:00 AM if it has none, so check the date afterwards rather than assuming the series starts next week.

9. Stop a recurrence

To end a series and keep the work order, open the Recurrence row, pick Does not repeat, and select Save. The rule is cleared and the work order stays where it is, with its history, comments and attachments intact.

In the create modal, Clear in the top right of the recurrence dropdown does the same before the work order exists. Clearing the due date also drops the rule, because the series has nothing left to anchor to.

Deleting the work order is the wrong way to stop a PM. It takes the machine's maintenance history with it, which is the record the next person needs when the same bearing fails again.

Recurrence fields

The saved rule is shown as a sentence on the work order, in the Recurrence column of the board's Table view, on the card in every other view when that field is switched on, and in the CSV export. Turning the column on and off is in Organize work on the maintenance board.

See also

• Trigger maintenance from meter readings. Runtime and cycle counts as the trigger, instead of the calendar.
• Shifts and timezone. Set the organization timezone a rule can be pinned to.
• Create a maintenance work order. Every other field a work order carries.
• Organize work on the maintenance board. Find recurring work in the calendar and table views.
• Work order fields and statuses. Every field, status and export column, in one table.