Commercial Plumbing Maintenance Checklist: Provide Consistent and Scalable Service (Free Template)

In this post, we share a commercial plumbing preventative maintenance checklist to help ensure that your plumbers take all necessary steps and use the same consistent process when doing plumbing inspections and preventative maintenance on commercial buildings. 

The template guides technicians through the following steps:

• Check for Water Leakage

• Check Water Pressure

• Check Water Heating

• Check Drains

• Check Backflow

• Check Valves

• Check for Corrosion or Rust

We'll provide additional context about the checklist template below—with a link to download it for free—along with how to begin leveraging it in your business.

Keep in mind, however, that a checklist alone won’t solve the significant challenges involved in managing and executing the processes that surround commercial preventative maintenance agreements. For example:

• Storing, tracking, updating, and accessing maintenance plan details for customers

• Ensuring that maintenance visits are scheduled on time

• Ensuring that checklists are actually used and completed for every maintenance job

• Documenting issues that are discovered and sharing that information between field technicians and office staff

• Creating and presenting estimates for replacing faulty parts or plumbing systems

• Following up on unsold estimates 

• Navigating multiple levels of approval to get paid on time and maintain cash flow 

Managing these time-consuming tasks with disparate paper documents, spreadsheets, and apps—as many plumbing businesses do—often leads to headaches for staff, costly mistakes, and ultimately lost revenue. 

So, in addition to sharing the maintenance checklist below, we’ll also walk through how our commercial plumbing software, ServiceTitan, solves the challenges involved in managing preventative maintenance processes and agreements.

Do you want to see for yourself how ServiceTitan’s commercial plumbing software can give you the tools you need to streamline operations and maximize your profits? Schedule a call for a free product tour.

How to Download and Use Our Commercial Plumbing Preventative Maintenance Checklist

After saving it to your computer, you can customize it by editing the PDF to include your company name, address, and logo. 

Our free preventative maintenance checklist is divided into the following sections:

Preventative Maintenance Job Details

This section of the template provides fields to document the date, job location, and technicians responsible for performing the preventive maintenance services.

Check for Water Leakage

This section provides fields to mark down whether signs of active leaks were detected (puddles, water damage, leaky faucets, overflows, water spots, mildew, etc.), and whether the water leaks were fixed during the visit. 

Check Water Pressure

This section prompts technicians to check and record whether or not the water pressure meets standards.

Check Water Heating

This section prompts technicians to check and record whether or not the water heaters on site meet necessary standards.

Check Drains

This section provides fields to mark down whether drain clogs were detected, and whether or not those drain blockages were fixed during the visit. 

Check Backflow (Backflow Testing)

This section prompts technicians to inspect and test backflow prevention devices and record that they’ve done so during their visit.

Check Valves

This section prompts technicians to inspect and test the shutoff valves/safety valves and record that they’ve done so during their visit.

Check for Corrosion or Rust

This section provides fields to mark down if there are signs of corrosion or rust issues detected, and whether or not the issues were fixed during the visit. 

Now, while this checklist template can provide your technicians with a document to follow and fill out in the field while doing regular maintenance, it has limitations. For example, when using paper checklists, it can be difficult to ensure that technicians actually fill them out while they’re in the field, not to mention that they have copies in their truck to begin with. 

In addition, there are many additional apps and tools required to manage the operations surrounding preventive maintenance work: tracking maintenance agreement details, scheduling jobs according to agreed-upon time frames, drafting estimates for repairs when plumbing problems are detected, getting paid in a reasonable amount of time, etc.

Below, we’ll walk through how commercial service software like ServiceTitan can help solve the challenges involved in these processes and streamline your operations.

How ServiceTitan Streamlines Commercial Plumbing Preventative Maintenance

1. Easily Document, Track, and Access Preventative Maintenance Agreement Details

With ServiceTitan’s memberships feature, plumbing companies have a central location to set up maintenance agreements and document recurring service details for their commercial clients. 

In a single place, companies can select and record all of the crucial details of a preventative maintenance contract, including:

• Maintenance contract type 

• Duration of the agreement

• Maintenance locations (single or multiple)

• Billing frequency and pricing 

• Recurring service types and frequency (monthly, quarterly, or yearly maintenance)

• Revenue recognition (point of sale or deferred)

Because these details are centralized in one place, there’s no need to go sifting or scanning through paper files or spreadsheets to find or update maintenance agreement information. A quick search will pull up all the details you need, as well as allow you to easily edit details as necessary. 

In addition, maintenance agreement information can be viewed at any time by office staff and field techs alike. If a plumbing technician is out on a job, there’s no need to call the office for past job details. They can view past maintenance work (including images, videos, estimates, etc.) to be fully informed about the history of the client and location.

And, crucially, our maintenance agreement features integrate seamlessly with the other tools in ServiceTitan that you use to book appointments, execute jobs, create estimates, manage billing and accounting, etc.—as we’ll demonstrate next.

2. Efficiently Schedule Preventative Maintenance Visits (According to Agreed Upon Time Frames)

Once recurring service events are established during the maintenance agreement setup, they are automatically added to your schedule based on the dates and frequency that were defined. This saves office staff significant time from having to manually track and add these jobs to the schedule, while reducing the chances of missing maintenance visits.

Office staff can view upcoming recurring service events for the date range of their choosing, and initiate individual jobs by contacting the customer to coordinate a time and book the job. At that point, the job will be assigned to a plumbing tech, and be automatically viewable on their schedule and through the dispatch board.

You can also create follow-up notifications for cases where you’re unable to contact a customer, they aren’t ready to book a job, or they no longer want the service. These offer plumbing contractors peace of mind and help to ensure that office staff doesn’t forget to follow up in these instances. 

3. Thoroughly Equip Commercial Plumbers with the Tools to Provide Consistent, Quality Plumbing Services

Once plumbing technicians are on site to perform maintenance services, they have numerous tools at their disposal via our mobile app (available on Android and iOS devices), including:

Access to Detailed Job Histories

First, they they have access to the customer’s complete job history, including:

• Previous estimates

• Recurring services

• Existing equipment

• Previous invoices

• Photos and videos

• Job notes

There’s no need for them to constantly get on the phone with the office to figure out essential details, and there’s no chance of them forgetting key paperwork at the office. This helps avoid job delays, provide better customer experiences, and avoid delays in service and payment.

Access to Plumbing Maintenance Checklists

In addition, technicians can access or be prompted to fill out plumbing maintenance checklists via our custom forms feature. These checklists can be created and customized via the office or the field. 

Business owners can require technicians to complete these forms to close out a job—helping to foster accountability and ensure key steps aren’t missed during routine maintenance.

So, if a maintenance job requires assessing motel bathrooms, the checklist can ensure that techs perform a thorough checkup, grading all of the necessary elements. For example:

• Showerheads and fixtures

• Shower and bathtub drains

• Sink water faucets and fixtures

• Sink drains

• Toilet inspection (checking for clogs, limescale buildup, etc.)

These forms can be duplicated easily to account for assessing additional plumbing systems on a given job (particularly useful in a commercial service context). And they can also be easily customized. So, if you want techs to assess flow rate in addition to water pressure, you can add that to your checklist with a few clicks. 

Crucially, they also provide documentation of work to explain to customers when an issue or breakdown needs to be addressed.

Access to Warranty Details and the Ability to Order Replacement Parts

In cases where technicians encounter parts or fixtures that aren’t in working order (e.g., a malfunctioning garbage disposal in a commercial kitchen), they can easily access warranty information on that equipment (in cases where it was installed by their company). This can allow them to more quickly understand next steps for addressing the issue. 

When parts or fixtures are under warranty, plumbers can also initiate orders for replacement parts right from their tablet, which can then be followed up and executed by office or warehouse staff (who can leverage our inventory tracking workflow to see that entire process through).

Ability to Quickly Create and Send Estimates From the Field

When plumbers discover issues on maintenance jobs, they can either:

1. Create an estimate on the spot for resolving the issue. Our mobile estimates feature allows technicians to select equipment and materials from ServiceTitan’s integrated pricebook functionality, and easily build an estimate on the spot. That estimate can be presented via the tablet if someone is on location to view the estimate, or it can be emailed for review and approval.  

2. Upload the relevant details of the issue to the mobile app (photos, videos, notes, etc.), and notify the office to create an estimate for resolving the issue. Office staff can view the photos, notes, etc. in real time, allowing them to create and send an estimate quickly. There’s no need to wait for techs to bring paper documents back to the office, and there’s no chance of losing crucial photos or notes. This feature significantly reduces the time it takes to deliver estimates to customers, who often need the work done urgently. 

In addition, our follow-up features can be leveraged via the field and office to track and follow up on open estimates that are sent to customers, allowing you to close more deals, and maximize profits. 

4. Automate Billing and Get Paid Faster

Finally, ServiceTitan offers a number of features that help you get paid faster with less effort on behalf of your team.

Once you’ve defined the billing settings in the membership setup, ServiceTitan will automatically deliver invoices to customers at the appropriate times (based on the preferences you set—which include duration, frequency, pricing, a corresponding invoice template, and other flexible details such as discounts, customer-specific pricing, etc.).

This is a huge timesaver, relieving your staff of the need to track every maintenance agreement client, set reminders, create new invoices for each billing period, and ensure they get sent at the appropriate times. All of this is simply done for you. 

In addition, customers have access to a self-serve customer portal. This allows them to log in and view their maintenance agreement details any time, as well as view detailed job histories, schedule appointments, view invoices, and pay their bills—without the need to call in, make requests, speak to your team, etc.—all of which further reduce the demands on your staff, and free them up to focus on other important tasks.

Get a ServiceTitan Demo to See How We Can Transform Your Plumbing Business Operations and Maximize Your Profits

While plumbing checklists for preventative maintenance can be useful to an extent, a static checklist template is just one of many tools and apps needed to successfully manage and execute plumbing preventive maintenance jobs. 

This is why we’ve developed an entire suite of tools, including digital checklist functionality, that help to streamline commercial plumbing preventative maintenance processes.

ServiceTitan’s plumbing software helps you manage all aspects of your plumbing business, saving your team the time and effort involved in paper-based procedures. Schedule a call now for a free product tour.