The last week of the quarter belongs to reporting
A housing provider wants a quarterly report covering every lift: planned visits completed, call-outs, entrapments, time out of service, open defects and quotes outstanding. A facilities management company wants something similar but in their own template, split by building. A hospital trust wants it monthly.
Your contracts manager exports jobs from the system into a spreadsheet, filters by customer, cross-checks against the planner, fixes lifts recorded against the wrong site, counts entrapments by reading call-out notes, and pastes charts into a Word document. It takes days for the big customers. For smaller ones, reports simply stop happening.
Why reporting is so manual
The data mostly exists. The trouble is that it lives across several places and has never been shaped for reporting.
- Visits, call-outs and repairs are in the job system, but lift references are inconsistent.
- Entrapments are not always flagged separately from other call-outs.
- Time out of service is worked out from notes rather than from recorded events.
- Open defects and quotes are in different lists again.
- Each customer wants a different layout and level of detail.
What manual reports cost
Report weeks take senior people away from customers and engineers. Errors creep in when numbers are copied by hand, and a customer who finds one mistake doubts the rest. When reports are late or dropped, customers form their view of your service from their own complaints log instead. That is a poor starting point for a contract review.
Reports built from the records, not from exports
We build a reporting layer that reads your job and lift records and produces each customer's report automatically, ready for a person to check.
- Data from your job system, call-out log, defect register and quote records is pulled into a reporting database each night.
- Records are cleaned up as they arrive: lift references matched, entrapments identified from their own field or flagged for review if only in the notes, and out-of-service periods calculated from recorded status changes.
- Each customer has a report template: which sections, which measures, what period and what layout, including their own template if they require one.
- At period end, draft reports are generated for every customer, with charts and tables, and a list of anything that looks odd, such as a lift with no visits recorded.
- The contracts manager reviews each draft, adds commentary, and approves it for sending by email or to a customer portal.
- Customers who want live figures can have a read-only dashboard showing the same measures.
| Report section | Built from |
|---|---|
| Planned visits completed | Visit records per lift against schedule |
| Call-outs and entrapments | Call-out log with categories |
| Time out of service | Status changes on each lift |
| Open defects | Defect register linked to examinations |
| Quotes awaiting approval | Quote records by status |
Where the underlying record is incomplete, the report says so. We do not fill gaps with estimates.
A worked month end
On the first working day of the month the contracts manager opens a list of twelve draft reports. Eleven look normal. One shows a lift with no planned visit in the period, which turns out to be a lift isolated for refurbishment; the manager adds a note and approves it. Commentary on the hospital report mentions two entrapments and what was done. By lunchtime every report has gone, and the manager spends the afternoon preparing for a renewal meeting using the same figures.
What customers and your team get
Reports go out on time, every time, and look the same each period, so customers can compare. Your contracts manager reviews drafts instead of building reports from exports. Figures are consistent across reports, reviews and tenders because they come from the same place. And the process shows up gaps in your own data, which get fixed at source.
Recognise this reporting load?
- Customer reports are built from spreadsheet exports.
- Reports for smaller customers have quietly stopped.
- Entrapments are counted by reading notes.
- Time out of service is estimated rather than recorded.
- Figures in reports do not always match figures in reviews.