What the Preventive Maintenance Checklist Builder does
This builder turns a list of maintenance tasks into a usable checklist: grouped by interval, with the trade and the time each needs, safety and isolation steps printed first, sign-off boxes on every line, and the labour hours per cycle and per year worked out so the schedule can be resourced rather than hoped for.
The yearly labour figure is the part that changes conversations. A ten-minute weekly task is nearly nine hours a year; four of them are a week of somebody's time. Writing the schedule without adding it up is how maintenance plans quietly become fiction.
Tasks triggered by run hours or by condition are listed separately and carry no yearly figure, because annualising them would need a duty assumption this page does not have. Everything runs in your browser.
How to use it
- Name the asset, its location and a document reference so the printed sheet can be filed and found again.
- Enter each task on one line: description, interval, trade, minutes, people and - for isolation, permit and lock-off steps - the word safety at the end.
- Use the interval names the page understands: shift, daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, sixmonthly, annual, biennial, fiveyear, runhours and condition.
- Give the number of people where a task needs two: labour is minutes times people, so a 45-minute two-person job is 90 labour-minutes and costs that much resource.
- Read the labour-by-trade table before agreeing the schedule, then print the sheet or export CSV for the maintenance system.
Reading the results
Labour-minutes per cycle is what the job costs each time it comes round; labour-minutes per year is that multiplied by the frequency. The two together show which tasks dominate, and it is very rarely the annual overhaul.
Safety steps print first regardless of their interval, because that is the order the job is actually done in. A checklist that puts lock-off halfway down the page is a checklist somebody will work past.
Interval groups match the way work is scheduled: the weekly tasks go out as one work order, the quarterly ones as another. Grouping them on the sheet is what makes it usable at the machine.
Run-hours and condition-based tasks are shown in their own group with no yearly labour. Converting them needs the duty cycle, which belongs to the run-hour meter, not to a web page.
Worked example: a belt conveyor schedule
The weekly work is four tasks: isolate and prove dead (10 minutes, marked safety), check guards and emergency stops (10 minutes, safety), grease the drive and idler bearings (15 minutes) and inspect the belt (10 minutes). That is 45 labour-minutes a week, and 52 weeks makes 2,340 minutes - 39 hours a year.
The quarterly belt-tension check is 45 minutes for two people, so 90 labour-minutes a cycle and 360 a year, six hours.
A six-monthly thermographic survey is 30 minutes twice a year: one hour. The annual gearbox overhaul is 240 minutes for two people, 480 labour-minutes, eight hours.
Total calendar-driven labour is 39 + 6 + 1 + 8 = 54 hours a year. The weekly tasks are 72% of it, and the overhaul that dominates the plan on paper is 15%.
The wear-strip replacement is triggered by run hours, so it carries no yearly figure at all and is listed separately - honest, rather than a guess dressed up as a plan.
Formulas and scoring rules
- Labour per occurrence
labourMinutes = minutes x people- Labour per year
yearly = labourMinutes x occurrences per yearshift 1095, daily 365, weekly 52, fortnightly 26, monthly 12, quarterly 4, six-monthly 2, annual 1, biennial 0.5, five-yearly 0.2.- Non-calendar tasks
no yearly figureRun-hours and condition-based tasks are excluded from the annual total and listed separately, because annualising them needs a duty assumption.- Cost per year
cost = yearly labour hours x hourly ratePlanned time on the tool only - see the limits below.
Planned time is not the time the job takes
The minutes on a PM task are hands-on time at the machine. The shift also contains the walk to the plant, finding the permit, waiting for an operator to free the line, collecting parts, isolating, de-isolating and writing the job up. On most sites that overhead is a third again on top of the task time, and on a permit-heavy plant it can double it.
Schedule against the task time and the week will not fit. Schedule against the task time plus a realistic overhead and it will. The figure this page gives you is deliberately the first of those, because the overhead is specific to your site and you should apply it knowingly rather than have it baked in.
Which tasks are worth doing at all
A PM schedule inherited from a manual usually contains tasks that address failure modes the asset does not have, at intervals that came from nowhere. IEC 60300-3-11 sets out the reliability-centred maintenance question to ask instead: for each failure mode, is there a task that is both applicable and worth doing, and if not, is the right answer to run to failure?
Two things follow. Tasks that catch a developing fault - vibration, thermography, oil analysis - are usually worth more than fixed-interval strip-downs, because they are triggered by the machine rather than the calendar. And a strip-down at a fixed interval can introduce infant-mortality failures that would not otherwise have happened, which is why 'more PM' is not automatically better.
Limitations: what the result does not prove
- It arranges and adds up what you enter. It does not know your asset's failure modes, and it cannot tell you whether a task is worth doing or whether the interval is right - that is an RCM or FMEA question.
- The labour figure is planned time on the tool. Travel, permits, isolation, waiting for access and paperwork are not included and are usually a third again on top.
- Run-hours and condition-based tasks are not annualised, so the yearly total is only for the calendar-driven work.
- The printed sheet is a working checklist, not a statutory record. Statutory examinations - pressure systems, lifting equipment, electrical installations - have their own prescribed forms, intervals and competent-person requirements.
Privacy: where your data goes
Everything you paste, type or drop is processed in this browser tab. It is not uploaded, logged, stored or sent to analytics. Session recording and tag-manager scripts are switched off on this page.
Standards and sources
- IEC 60300-3-11 - Dependability: reliability centred maintenance - checked 19 Sep 2026
- IEC 60812 - Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA and FMECA)
- ISO 22400-2 - Key performance indicators for manufacturing operations management
Frequently asked questions
What should a preventive maintenance checklist include?
The asset and its reference, the safety and isolation steps at the top, each task with the interval, trade and time it needs, a place to record the result or initials, and a sign-off. The times matter as much as the tasks: without them the schedule cannot be resourced.
How do I work out how many maintenance hours a year a machine needs?
Multiply each task's minutes by the number of people, then by how many times a year it happens, and add them up. Ten minutes weekly is 8.7 hours a year; a four-hour annual overhaul is four. Frequent short tasks almost always dominate.
How often should preventive maintenance be done?
There is no universal interval. Start with the manufacturer's recommendation, then adjust from your own failure history and the consequence of failure. IEC 60300-3-11 (reliability-centred maintenance) is the structured way to decide, and some items genuinely belong on run-to-failure.
Why should safety steps come first on the sheet?
Because that is the order the work is done in, and a checklist is read from the top. Isolation, lock-off and proving dead belong ahead of every task that depends on them; this page prints them first whatever interval they carry.
Should PM tasks be scheduled by calendar or by run hours?
By whatever drives the wear. A machine that runs one shift a week ages by hours, not by months, and a calendar schedule will over-maintain it; a machine that corrodes when idle ages by calendar regardless of hours. Run-hours tasks are kept separate here for exactly that reason.
Can a checklist be too detailed?
Yes. A sheet with eighty items on it gets ticked without being read, which is worse than a sheet with twelve items that are genuinely checked. Detail is worth having where the task is unusual or the acceptance criterion is specific; for routine work, fewer and clearer wins.
Does more preventive maintenance always mean more reliability?
No. Intrusive maintenance carries its own risk: seals disturbed, bolts re-torqued wrongly, connectors re-made. RCM studies routinely find that a large share of scheduled overhauls introduce more failures than they prevent, which is why condition-based tasks tend to beat fixed-interval strip-downs.
Is this checklist a statutory inspection record?
No. Statutory examinations such as pressure-system written schemes, lifting-equipment thorough examinations and periodic electrical inspections have prescribed forms, intervals and competent-person requirements. Put them on your schedule by all means, but the record itself comes from the inspecting body.
Last reviewed by the A2Z.Tools team against the sources listed above.
