Equipment and machines

The line between Inventory and Equipment is whether the thing comes back. A bottle of degreaser is consumed and needs reordering, so it is inventory. A £400 vacuum is lent out, used, and returned, so it is equipment. They are separate screens because they answer separate questions: inventory answers "what needs ordering", equipment answers "where has it gone and what condition is it in".

The Equipment Register

The page is titled Equipment, subtitled "Track equipment, loans and maintenance", with one action: Add Equipment. Four counts sit under the title, and the search box beside them matches on name or serial number, which is the one search on the site where typing a serial off a sticker is the fast route.

The table is headed Equipment Register and holds ten rows to a page. As on Inventory, no column header sorts: ordering is the third control in the toolbar, offering "Name (A–Z)", "Name (Z–A)", "Category", "Status" and "Condition". The status filter beside it reads All Status in its default position, then Available, Loaned, Maintenance and Retired.

Categories, statuses and condition

Three separate vocabularies do three separate things, and mixing them up is the commonest confusion on this screen.

Category: what kind of thing it is

Six fixed categories, each with its own pill colour: Cleaning, Electrical, Access, Safety, Tools and Other. Cleaning is preselected on the add form. The strip above the table filters on these plus "All". Category is a sorting aid and nothing more: nothing in the app behaves differently because a machine is Electrical rather than Tools.

Status: where it is right now

Status moves on its own as you loan and return. Maintenance and Retired are set by hand from the detail sheet, and an item in either gets no action button in its hero: you cannot loan out a machine that is away being fixed.

Condition: how worn it is

Four grades, Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, with Good as the default on a new record. Beneath the grade sits a free-text Condition notes field, and that is the field that does the real work. "Excellent" tells you nothing in six months. "Cable repaired Aug 26, watch the strain relief" tells you everything.

Who has it, not where it is

This is the important correction on this screen. Equipment is assigned to a person, not to a site. There is no location field on an equipment record and no way to say "the rotary lives at Bay View Offices". The Assigned To column holds the name of the cleaner who currently has it out, and an em dash when nobody does.

In practice that is usually the answer you actually wanted, because a machine is wherever the person holding it is working today. If you genuinely keep a machine permanently at one site, the honest options are to put the site in the machine name, or to put it in the condition notes.

The cleaner list holds active cleaners only, alphabetically. Once loaned, the item's status flips to Loaned, the row shows the borrower, and the action button becomes Mark Returned. If the write half-fails, the loan row is deleted again rather than left behind, so a machine can never end up double-loaned.

A cleaner can ask to hand something back from their phone. That marks the loan as return requested, and three things change: an amber banner appears at the top of the screen counting the items pending return, a small Return requested flag appears under the Loaned pill, and the action button becomes the urgent Confirm Return. That banner is the only warning banner on this page.

What one equipment record holds

Add Equipment opens a drawer subtitled "Track a new piece of equipment", in four sections. The detail sheet afterwards shows the same fields as a four-cell grid, each reading an em dash when it is empty.

The photo is worth doing. A picture of the machine with its rating plate visible settles most arguments about which of three near-identical vacuums came back damaged, and the thumbnail then appears beside the name in the register. Anything over 5 MB is refused outright with "That photo is larger than 5 MB. Choose a smaller image."

Maintenance is a log, not a schedule

Open an item and there are three tabs: Details, Loans and Maintenance. It matters to be exact about what the last one is.

Maintenance is a historical record of things that have already been done. There is no service interval, no next-service-due date, no reminder, and no notification. Nothing anywhere in CleanFlo compares a warranty expiry or a purchase date against today, so a warranty running out next Tuesday produces no warning of any kind. If you need reminding, that reminder has to live in your calendar, not here.

The add form has four fields: Date and Description are required, Cost (£, optional) and Performed by (optional) are not. Save it and the toast reads "Maintenance entry added". With nothing recorded, the tab shows "No maintenance records yet."

The Loans tab beside it is the assignment history: one entry per loan with an Active or Returned chip, the borrower, and a composed line reading the loan date, then the due date, then the return date. Newest first. That tab is what you read when a machine comes back broken and you need to know who had it last.

Exporting the register

A ghost Export CSV button sits beside the pager and writes equipment.csv with six headers: Name, Category, Serial Number, Condition, Status, Assigned To. A missing serial or borrower exports as an empty cell rather than a dash.

That file is the closest thing CleanFlo produces to an asset register for an insurance schedule. It does not carry the replacement cost, so if that is what you are after, the figure lives on each item's Details tab and has to be read from there.