Maintenance and work order best practices

Maintenance is where a lot of a property’s money goes, and where a lot of it leaks away when work isn’t tracked. A consistent routine — log the request, dispatch the vendor, record the bill, close the job — turns scattered repairs into a clean history you can budget from, defend in an insurance claim, and hand to a buyer at sale. This article covers how to use work orders, assets, and vendor records in TenantLedger to keep maintenance organized and your numbers trustworthy.

Create a work order before you dispatch anyone

The single most valuable habit is to open a work order first — before you call ABC Plumbing, before a staff member heads out, even for a five-minute fix.

Why it matters:

It timestamps when the issue was reported and by whom, which protects you if a tenant later claims a repair was ignored.
It builds a per-property and per-unit maintenance history you can actually search later.
It gives you something to attach the eventual bill and asset to, so the cost and the cause live together.

What to do in TenantLedger:

Open Work Orders in the left sidebar and add a new one.
Set the Property and Unit, a Priority (High / Medium / Low), and a Scheduled Date.
Set the Caller to the tenant who reported the issue — that is your record of who requested the work.
Assign the Vendor (or a staff member under Assigned To), pick a Category like “Plumbing,” and write a clear Short Description.

Even when you don’t yet know who will do the job, create the work order and leave the vendor blank. You can assign it later. See Create a work order.

Use priority and category consistently

Priority and category are only useful if you apply them the same way every time.

Priority drives what stands out on your Work Orders list. Reserve High for anything affecting habitability or safety (no heat, no water, a leak causing damage), use Medium for things that should be fixed soon, and Low for cosmetic or non-urgent work.
Category (Plumbing, Electrical, Appliance, HVAC, Turnover, etc.) lets you see patterns — for example, that one property eats up plumbing calls — so you can plan a real fix instead of repeating the same repair.

Pick a small, fixed set of categories and stick to them. Inconsistent labels make your history harder to read than no labels at all.

Keep the work order current through its lifecycle

A work order is a living record, not a one-time note. As the job moves along:

Add notes for what you learned, quotes received, or scheduling changes.
Attach the property’s assets that the job touched (the furnace, the water heater) so the repair shows up in that asset’s history.
Mark it complete when the work is done.

A typical lifecycle looks like: Open → assigned to a vendor → scheduled → work done → bill recorded → completed. Closing the loop matters — an open work order that’s actually finished makes your list lie to you. See Update or complete a work order.

Connect the work to a bill

Tracking the task and tracking the cost are two halves of the same job. When a vendor finishes and sends an invoice:

Enter a Bill from that vendor against the property, and categorize the expense correctly (for example, Repairs & Maintenance).
Pay the bill when due and keep the payment tied to the right bank account.
Mark the related work order complete.

This is what makes your maintenance spend show up accurately on your reports and lets you compare what a job should cost against what it did. See Add a bill and Pay a bill.

For predictable, repeating costs — monthly pest control, quarterly HVAC service, a landscaping contract — set up a recurring bill so the expense is entered automatically and you never forget to budget for it. See Set up a recurring bill.

Track major assets and plan replacements

Big-ticket items — HVAC systems, water heaters, refrigerators, roofs — fail eventually, and an emergency replacement costs more than a planned one. Recording them as assets turns “the furnace died” into “the furnace is 14 years old and due.”

Why it matters:

The warranty expiration date tells you at a glance whether a repair might still be covered before you pay a vendor out of pocket.
Life expectancy and the threshold let you flag an item as it approaches the end of its life, so you can budget the replacement in advance instead of scrambling.
Opening an asset’s Summary shows its details and the related work orders, giving you the full repair history for that one piece of equipment.

What to do: Add an asset whenever you install or inherit a significant item — record its make/model, date purchased, warranty expiration, life expectancy, and a threshold percentage. Attach the asset to work orders as you service it. See Track an asset for a property.

Tip: When a repeat-repair asset finally needs replacing, the work-order history attached to it is your evidence. “We’ve had ABC Plumbing out to this water heater three times this year” is a much easier replacement decision to justify.

Keep vendor records clean for 1099s

The vendors you pay for maintenance are often the contractors you’ll need to issue 1099s for at year-end. The time to keep their records accurate is now, not in January.

Why it matters: A 1099 needs the vendor’s legal name and current mailing address. If that information is stale or missing, tax season turns into a scramble of phone calls.

What to do:

Create a vendor record before entering bills, so every invoice attaches to the right payee. See Add a vendor.
Keep each vendor’s name and mailing address current — the same details are used when you print checks, so accuracy pays off twice.
At year-end, run the Vendor Report to pull your vendor roster, contact details, and outstanding balances. To total what you actually paid a vendor during the tax year (the figure a 1099 reports), run the Bill Report filtered to that vendor and date range. See Run the Vendor Summary (for 1099s).

A month-end maintenance routine

A short, repeatable pass keeps your maintenance data honest:

Review the Work Orders list and close out anything that’s actually finished.
Confirm every completed job has a corresponding bill entered and categorized.
Check High priority items that are still open — chase the ones that have stalled.
Scan your assets for any nearing their replacement threshold and note them for the budget.
Update any vendor whose address or contact info changed.

Common mistakes to avoid

Don’t dispatch a vendor without a work order. A verbal call leaves no record; the work order is your history and your audit trail.
Don’t leave completed jobs marked Open. A stale list hides what’s truly outstanding and makes priorities meaningless.
Don’t record the bill without tying it back to the job. The cost and the cause should live together so your reports reflect real maintenance spend.
Do categorize maintenance expenses consistently (for example, Repairs & Maintenance) so year-over-year comparisons actually mean something.
Don’t skip asset records for big equipment. Without life expectancy and warranty dates, you’re reacting to failures instead of planning for them.
Don’t let vendor addresses go stale. It quietly breaks both your 1099 prep and your printed checks.
Do attach assets to work orders so each piece of equipment builds its own service history.