Start from obligations, not from a calendar template. A preventive schedule is the intersection of three lists: what the law or a regulator requires on a fixed cycle, what the manufacturer specifies for each asset, and what your own failure history says goes wrong. Software is good at holding all three, proposing a plan and rescheduling it when reality intervenes. It is not good at deciding that a deferral is acceptable, and in Ontario a tidy preventive programme is expressly not an answer to a repair a tenant has actually reported.
Key takeaways
The reason preventive maintenance is worth automating is not that filters get changed more often. It is that the schedule stops living in one person’s head. Once every asset has a record — what it is, where it is, when it was installed, what its service interval is, when it was last touched — generating next quarter’s plan is a query, and rescheduling it when a contractor cancels is another query. The judgment left over is which deferrals are acceptable, and that is exactly the judgment you want a person spending their attention on.
Ontario’s baseline duty is broad. Section 20 of the Residential Tenancies Act provides that a landlord is responsible for providing and maintaining a residential complex, including the rental units in it, in a good state of repair and fit for habitation and for complying with health, safety, housing and maintenance standards, and it applies even if the tenant was aware of a state of non-repair before entering into the tenancy agreement. The Board also notes that the obligation extends beyond the rental unit occupied by the tenant, to include the facilities and common areas provided for tenants by the landlord — lobby, hallways, stairwells, laundry, parking, exterior grounds. Any asset register that stops at the suite door is already incomplete.
Then there is the point most preventive-maintenance pitches get backwards. The Board’s guideline records that a landlord may assert a good programme of maintenance and repair, including preventative maintenance and a system of processing complaints, but that this is not a release of the landlord’s responsibility to respond to a real problem. The schedule does not buy you time on a reported fault. It reduces how many faults get reported.
Some obligations carry their own clock. TSSA states that owners and licensees of elevators in residential buildings and long-term care homes are required to report elevator outages lasting more than 48 hours to the Technical Standards and Safety Authority within 30 days from the day the elevator is returned to service. That is not a maintenance task, it is a reporting task triggered by a maintenance event — and it is precisely the kind of thing that gets missed because the person who fixed the lift is not the person who files with the regulator. Encode it as a rule on the work order type.
A scheduling engine needs a ranking rule, and there is an established one. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety describes risk assessment as the overall process of identifying hazards, assessing the risk of hazards, and prioritizing hazards associated with a specific activity, task, or job, which considers the probability or likelihood of harm from exposure and the potential consequence or severity of harm from exposure to a hazard. Applied to a building: a component whose failure is likely and whose consequence is serious — a failing sump pump below occupied units, a heating plant entering its twentieth winter — outranks a cosmetic item whose failure is certain but trivial.
That framing also tells you when not to let software decide. CCOHS treats hazard control as part of the same process; deciding to accept a risk, or to defer a control, is a decision a person makes and owns. A model can rank; it should not sign off a deferral.
Three inputs, one schedule
Regulatory and code cycles. Fire safety equipment, elevating devices, fuel-fired appliances, backflow prevention, anything with a statutory inspection or reporting trigger.
Manufacturer intervals. Whatever the equipment documentation specifies, held against the actual install date rather than the date the building opened.
Your own failure history. Which assets generate repeat work orders, which units call twice a winter, which contractor’s repairs come back.
The output. A proposed plan with each task carrying its source — regulation, manual or history — so a manager approving it can see why it is on the list.
In-unit preventive work needs the tenant to let someone in, and the notice rules apply just as they do for a repair. The LTB’s guideline states that the landlord can enter a rental unit between 8:00 am and 8:00 pm if they have given the tenant a written notice of entry at least 24 hours in advance to repair or, where it is reasonable to do so, to inspect. The notice content is prescribed — a written notice of entry must specify the date, time and the reason for entering the rental unit — and the Divisional Court has held that the notice of entry must specify an actual time of entry — a broad window of time, in that case six hours, during which the landlord may enter is not sufficient. A scheduling engine that plans a day of suite visits therefore has to commit to times a day ahead, which changes how tightly you can route.
Common-area work is easier, because a landlord does not need to serve the tenant with a notice of entry to enter common areas like hallways in apartment buildings or kitchens in rooming houses. Splitting the plan into in-suite and common-area streams, and batching in-suite work by riser or floor so one notice run covers a block of units, is the single biggest efficiency available.
A schedule that books the cheapest available person for a boiler service is a schedule with a legal problem in it. In Ontario registered fuels contractors are the only businesses that are legally authorized to do fuels related work, and only electrical contractors licensed by ESA may do electrical work for hire. Skilled Trades Ontario adds that there are 23 compulsory trades in the province and that journeypersons in compulsory trades must renew their Certificate of Qualification each year. Build those as filters on the task type, not as a note in the description field.
For portfolios spanning provinces, the B.C. formulation is worth reading because it is more explicitly standards-based: a landlord must provide and maintain residential property in a state of decoration and repair that complies with the health, safety and housing standards required by law, and, having regard to the age, character and location of the rental unit, makes it suitable for occupation by a tenant, and that obligation applies whether or not a tenant knew of a breach at the time of entering into the tenancy agreement. Entry for planned work runs on its own rule there: at least 24 hours and not more than 30 days before the entry, written notice stating the purpose, which must be reasonable, and the date and time of entry, which must be between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m..
The following is illustrative — a composite of how the workflow is usually assembled, not a measured result.
A manager of six mid-rise buildings loads an asset register: heating plant, domestic hot water, sump and booster pumps, roof drains, fire equipment, elevating devices, plus suite-level items with install dates. Each asset carries a source-tagged interval — regulatory, manufacturer, or history-driven. A quarterly job proposes the plan and ranks it by likelihood and severity, so the twenty-year-old pump below occupied suites sits above the lobby door closer.
The manager approves the plan in an hour, moving three items and deferring one with a written reason attached to the asset. The engine then splits the approved list into common-area work, which is booked freely, and in-suite work, which is batched by riser. For each batch it generates the 24-hour notices with the reason and a stated time, and produces the contractor packs. Where a task is tagged fuels or electrical, only contractors with a current registration or ESA licence appear in the booking list.
When the lift is out for three days in February, closing that work order triggers a task with the TSSA reporting deadline already calculated from the return-to-service date. Nobody has to remember that the obligation exists.
It can rank assets by the evidence you have — age, service history, repeat call-outs, run hours if you capture them. Be careful how that is described. Ranking on observed history is not the same as a failure prediction, and a plan justified by a confident-sounding forecast nobody can reproduce is worse than a plan justified by "this pump is twenty years old and has failed twice".
It reduces the number of faults that get as far as an application, and it produces the dated record of what was done and when, which is the evidence you want. It does not excuse a slow response to a reported problem, and the guideline says so directly.
Far enough to buy contractor availability, which the Board itself recognises as a factor in what counts as timely, and short enough that the plan is still true. A rolling quarter approved monthly is a reasonable default for a residential portfolio.
Reactive work arrives through a different door — see turning a tenant photo into a work order and dispatching the right trade to the right unit. For the queue that sits underneath both, a maintenance request system that triages itself.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
