I'm the only maintenance person for seven business locations. A dealership, a parts warehouse, a body shop, and five separate auto parts stores, plus the service trucks that move between them. When something breaks, I'm the one who gets the call, no matter which of the seven sites it's at.
The calls used to come in however people felt like sending them. A text to my personal phone. A verbal "hey, when you get a second" in the parking lot. A voicemail with no callback number. Nothing was written down anywhere, so nothing could be tracked, prioritized, or handed off. If I forgot a request, there was no record that it ever happened.
The supply side was just as loose. I'd show up to fix a light fixture and discover I was out of the right bulbs, because the only inventory system was my memory of what I thought was still in the truck. Off-the-shelf work order software didn't fix either problem. That kind of software is built for facilities teams with a dozen technicians and a training budget, not a solo operation covering seven addresses. None of it treated a service truck as a real location with its own stock on the shelf, which is exactly what I needed.
It was actually my wife who called it. She'd hear me on the phone with yet another location, watch me try to reconstruct what was still on the truck from memory, and finally pointed out the obvious: I build exactly this kind of system for other businesses, so why was I running mine out of my head? She was right. So I built it.
How the System Works
So I built the tool myself, sized for the job I actually have.
- Report a Problem, No Account Needed: Anyone at any of the seven locations can flag an issue from their phone or a store computer in seconds. No username, no password, no app to download first.
- One Dashboard For Everything: Every request from every site lands in a single place I check, instead of six inboxes and a stack of sticky notes.
- Reminders Before Things Break: The system tracks routine maintenance on a schedule and automatically opens a reminder the day it's due, so upkeep happens on a calendar instead of only after something fails.
- A Real Supply Shelf for Every Location — and Every Truck: Common parts and supplies are tracked location by location, and the truck counts as its own location with its own running count. I always know what's on hand and what's not, before I'm standing in front of the broken fixture.
Overcoming the Friction
Making the Truck a Real Location Without Confusing the Front Desk
Trucks needed the same inventory tracking as a fixed store: a running count, a reorder point, a history of what was used and when. But I didn't want a store employee reporting a broken light and seeing "Truck" sitting in the same dropdown as their own building, wondering if they picked the wrong one.
I split the two views apart. The public report form only shows the seven physical locations, so nobody's guessing. Behind the scenes, the truck is a full-fledged location with its own shelf of supplies, visible to me on the inventory side where it belongs.
Killing Alert Fatigue Before It Started
The moment I started loading in real supply counts, half of them were already below where I'd eventually want a reorder alert, simply because I was entering historical numbers, not fresh restocks. If the system fired a low-stock email for every one of those on day one, I'd have learned to ignore my own alerts within a week.
I built the alert to only fire when a count crosses down below the line from a healthy level. Loading in a starting number that happens to be low stays silent. An actual drop from full to low sends an email. That distinction keeps the alerts meaningful instead of becoming noise I tune out.
Tying Every Part to the Job That Used It
A supply count by itself doesn't answer the question that actually matters: where did it go? I wanted every change in stock, whether it's a restock, a manual correction, or a part pulled for a specific repair, to leave a record tied back to the ticket or the routine maintenance job it belonged to. Now when a location's supply count drops, there's always a paper trail explaining why, not just a number that changed for no visible reason.
The Business Win
The real measure of this project is how much of my day it gives back.
No More Phone Tag: Every one of the seven locations reports issues the same way, and every issue lands in one place I actually check, instead of scattered texts and hallway conversations.
Fewer Wasted Trips: Knowing what's stocked on the truck and at each site before I head out means fewer mid-job runs back to the shop for a part I assumed I had.
A Shelf That Manages Itself: Reorder alerts only fire when something genuinely needs attention, so restocking is a five-minute glance instead of a manual count across seven locations and a truck.
Next up is connecting the two halves directly: when a repair ticket calls for a part, pulling it straight from the right location's shelf automatically, instead of me doing that math by hand.
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