What an area is
An area is a place inside a venue: the kitchen, the cellar, the customer WC, the bin store, a guest room. Maintenance is filed against areas as well as against equipment, because most of what breaks is not a machine. A dripping tap and a jammed fire door both happen somewhere rather than to something.
Areas live under Maintenance, then Areas. Each one has a name you choose and a type from a standard list, and the type is what lets you ask a question across every site at once.
The standard set for your venue
You do not have to build the list by hand. A site with no areas offers Seed defaults, which adds the set that suits its venue type: a pub gets a cellar and a bar servery, a care home gets resident rooms, a hotel gets guest rooms. Run it once per site. It skips anything you already have, so it is safe to run again.
Adding rooms in one go
Hotels, B and Bs, care homes and hospitals get an Add rooms button, because nobody is going to add sixty rooms one at a time.
Give it the number of floors, the rooms on each floor, the floor to start at and a prefix, and it shows you exactly what it will create before you commit. Three floors of twenty rooms produces Room 101 through to Room 320. A ground-floor-only guest house can start at floor 0 and get Room 001 upwards.
Re-running it does not duplicate anything. It tells you how many were added and how many already existed, so adding a new floor later is one action rather than a careful comparison.
There is a limit. A single run creates at most 500 rooms. Above that, split it into two runs by floor.
An areas fault history
Click an area and you get its history: every job raised there, what each one cost, the equipment sited in it, and the total spent. If three or more jobs of the same trade have come from that area in ninety days, a banner says so.
That banner is the useful part. A room that has had three plumbing callouts since the spring does not have three problems, it has one that nobody has fixed properly, and the pattern is invisible until the work is filed against the place.
Every customer WC across twenty sites
Because the type is standard, the maintenance board can filter on it. That answers questions a per-site list cannot: every customer WC across the estate, every cellar, every guest room. It is the reason areas have a type at all rather than just a name.
Removing an area
An area with no history can be deleted outright. One with jobs or equipment against it is deactivated instead, so it disappears from the lists staff pick from while its history stays intact. You are told which of the two will happen before you confirm.
Related
Areas also appear when staff raise a request on the app, so a report can name a room instead of describing it. See Logging Checks & Reports on the App.