How to Use the Procedure Library

Modified on Tue, 13 Oct at 2:45 PM

Overview

A procedure is a checklist of steps for a maintenance job — what to check, in what order, and what to look for. “Replace HVAC filter” might have six steps; “Quarterly pool inspection” might have twenty.


You’ll find them under Facilities → Procedures.


Procedures exist for one purpose: they attach to preventative maintenance schedules, so a technician opening a job on their phone sees exactly what to do. A maintenance schedule tells someone when and where. The procedure tells them how.


Your procedures are shared across all of your properties. There’s one library for your whole organization — not one per hotel. Any procedure can be used by any property.


What’s in your library

Two kinds of things:

  • Procedures your team creates. Whatever your organization builds, available to every property.

  • About ten ready-made procedures from Inn-Flow. These cover common jobs like HVAC and fire safety, and they’re based on widely used hotel maintenance standards. They arrive already tagged. Use them as they are, edit them to match how you work, or ignore them.


Why one library for all properties?

Because it’s what makes reusable maintenance templates work.


A PM template can be built once and used at any hotel. If a procedure belonged to only one property, every other hotel that used that template would get an empty checklist. One shared library means a template built at head office works everywhere. → PM Template Gallery: Build a Maintenance Schedule Once, Use It Everywhere


It also means you’re not rebuilding the same checklist at each hotel. Write “Replace HVAC Filter” once, use it at all sixty properties.


Creating and editing a procedure

Open Facilities → Procedures and create a new procedure. Give it a name, write out the steps, and optionally add tags.


Anything you create is available to every property straight away. There’s no publishing step and no per-property setting.


Who can do this: anyone whose role includes the permission to create and edit procedures. If you can see the option to add a procedure, you have it. Because the library is shared, that permission covers every procedure in your organization, not just the ones from your own hotel. If you’re not sure who should have it, that’s worth a look with your Inn-Flow administrator.


Everyone else can view procedures but not change them.


Attaching procedures to maintenance work

You attach procedures in two places, and they work the same way in both:

  • On a PM template — every property that adds the template gets those procedures

  • On a maintenance schedule at a property — just that schedule

In both cases you pick from the same shared library.

Once attached, technicians see the procedure’s steps when they open the job.


Finding what you need: tags, filters, and sort

A shared library at a large portfolio gets long. Three tools keep it manageable.


Tags

A tag is a short label you put on a procedure — “HVAC,” “Fire Safety,” “Guest Rooms.” You make up your own.

  • Tags are a field on the procedure form, and you can add more than one

  • If the tag you want doesn’t exist, you can create it right there while you’re tagging

  • Your tags belong to your whole organization, so everyone picks from the same list

  • Capitalization doesn’t matter - “HVAC” and “hvac” are the same tag, so your library won’t split over a capital letter

  • Tags show in the library list and on the procedure itself


Tags are optional. If your library is small, you may never need them.


Tagging lots of procedures at once

You don’t have to tag procedures one at a time. Select as many as you like in the library list and apply one or more tags to the whole batch in a single action.


This is the fastest way to organize a library that’s grown large, or one that has never been tagged.


Example. Your library has 140 procedures and none of them are tagged. You sort by name, tick everything with “filter,” “HVAC” or “air handler” in the title, and tag all 22 of them HVAC in one go. Then you do the same for plumbing, then fire safety. Twenty minutes, and the filter now does the work for you.



Filtering by tag

Use the tag filter to narrow the list:

  • Pick more than one tag and you’ll see procedures matching any of them — pick “HVAC” and “Plumbing” and you get both sets, not just procedures that are both

  • The tag filter works alongside the search box, so you can search within a filtered list

  • Clear the filters to get your whole library back

  • If nothing matches, you’ll see a message saying so


Sorting

You can change the order the list appears in:

  • Name (A–Z) — the starting point, and what you’ll see unless you change it

  • Name (Z–A)

  • Recently updated — useful for seeing what your team has been changing

  • Recently created — useful for spotting what’s new

Sorting works alongside the tag filter and the search box.


What should I tag with?

There’s no right answer, but most hotel groups end up with some mix of:

  • What system it is — HVAC, Plumbing, Electrical, Fire Safety, Pool

  • Where it happens — Guest Rooms, Common Areas, Back of House, Exterior

  • How often — Monthly, Quarterly, Annual

Start small. Five or six tags that you actually use beat thirty that nobody remembers. You can always add more.

The ready-made procedures from Inn-Flow arrive tagged, so they’re a reasonable model to copy if you’d rather not invent a scheme from scratch.


You don’t have to tag everything. Tag what you search for often — especially the procedures you attach to templates — and leave the rest.


Duplicate and near-duplicate procedures

If several of your properties built their own version of the same job, you’ll have more than one procedure for it. Inn-Flow doesn’t merge them automatically, because two procedures with the same name can be genuinely different — different products, different surfaces, different steps. Only you know which ones matter.


Decide which you want to keep, and deactivate the rest. Tags help too: tagging the one you actually use makes it easy to filter to.


Common questions

What’s a procedure for? It’s the checklist a technician follows for a maintenance job. You attach it to a preventative maintenance schedule so the steps show up when someone opens the job.


Are procedures separate for each property? No. There’s one library for your whole organization and every property can use every procedure.


Where did the ready-made procedures come from? Inn-Flow provides about ten, covering common maintenance jobs. They’re based on widely used hotel maintenance standards. You can edit or ignore them.


Can I keep a procedure private to one property? No. Procedures aren’t tied to properties and there’s no setting for that. If that’s a problem for something in your library, tell your Inn-Flow contact — we’d want to hear about it.


Who can create and edit procedures? Anyone whose role includes the procedure permission. Because the library is shared, that covers every procedure in your organization. Everyone else can view but not change.


Do I have to tag my procedures? No. Tags are optional and everything works without them. They just make a long library easier to search.


I have hundreds of untagged procedures. Do I really have to do them one at a time? No. Select as many as you like in the library list and tag the whole batch in one action.


Will “HVAC” and “hvac” become two tags? No. Capitalization is ignored, so they’re treated as the same tag.

Can I tag a template? No. Tags are on procedures only. To point templates at the right properties, use Recommended Properties instead. → Recommending Templates to Properties and Groups


Can I recommend a procedure to a property? No. Procedures have no property concept at all. Recommendations exist on templates only.


Does tagging change who can see or use a procedure? No. Tags are purely for finding things. Every procedure is available to every property, tagged or not.


What does Show Inactive do? It shows procedures that have been deactivated, so you can see or restore them.


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