A facility maintenance checklist is the visit written down: what is looked at, what is measured, what is recorded. A facility management checklist is wider, covering the contracts, the compliance dates and the reporting as well as the plant. Both are easy to download and hard to keep, and the reason is the same in each case: a checklist that leaves its answers on a sheet of paper in a folder has recorded nothing that can be asked a question later.
What belongs on the maintenance checklist
The asset it applies to, the interval it is run at, the checks in the order somebody would actually do them, a place for a reading rather than a tick where a number exists, and a place for what was found and deferred. The last of those is the one generic templates leave out, and it is the one that feeds the backlog. A tick sheet with no room for a finding produces a clean record of a building nobody looked at properly.
Why a generic template rarely survives
Downloaded checklists are written for a building that is not yours, so half the items do not apply and the ones that matter most are missing. The useful version is built from your own asset register: every asset with an interval generates its own list, and the checklist is the printed form of the schedule rather than a separate document. That is also why the register comes first and the checklist second, not the other way round.
The management checklist and its template
The wider facility management checklist is mostly dates: insurance renewals, statutory inspections, contract expiries, budget submissions. It is a calendar of obligations rather than a visit, and it belongs to the manager rather than the technician. A facility management checklist template is a reasonable starting point here precisely because obligations are more alike between buildings than plant is, but every line still needs a name and a date against it or it will not be done.
Questions people ask about facility maintenance checklist
Should checklists be on paper or on a phone?
On whatever gets filed against the asset. Paper works if it is transcribed the same day; in practice it is transcribed in batches from memory, and the record degrades in exactly the places the equipment is.
How detailed should each item be?
Detailed enough that two different people would record the same thing. Where a number exists, ask for the number rather than a tick: a pressure reading tells you about a trend and a tick tells you somebody was there.
Do we need a separate checklist per asset type?
Per asset type, yes, because the checks differ. Per asset, no: the schedule handles which instances are due, and duplicating the list per unit is how they drift out of step with each other.