Do you need a CAFM system, or do you need your inspection deadlines under control?

1. Who does the work - your team or contractors?

If your own technicians carry out most maintenance, you need to plan their time, parts and jobs. That is what a CAFM or CMMS does well: it turns a maintenance plan into work orders and tracks them to completion.

If specialist contractors do most of the statutory work - lift examinations, fire alarm servicing, gas, electrical testing, water hygiene - your job is different. You need to make sure each visit is booked in time, happens, and leaves a certificate on file. That is a deadline and evidence problem.

2. What actually goes wrong today?

Be honest about the failure you are trying to prevent. If jobs are lost between a helpdesk call and a technician, a work order system fixes that.

If the failure is an overdue inspection, an expired contractor insurance certificate, a lease break date nobody saw coming or a missing certificate when the insurer asks, the fix is an owner, a reminder cadence, escalation and a document on the record.

3. How much setup can you absorb?

CAFM platforms model your buildings, assets, spaces and workflows in detail. That depth pays off on a large estate but usually needs an implementation project, data preparation and training.

ExpiryEdge imports your current inspection spreadsheet, assigns owners and starts sending reminders on day one. There is no asset hierarchy to build first.

4. Who needs to see the reminder?

Site managers, caretakers and contract owners are rarely logged into an FM platform. If reminders only appear inside a system nobody opens, dates still slip.

ExpiryEdge sends reminders by email, SMS, WhatsApp, Slack or Microsoft Teams to the named owner, and escalates to a manager if a date passes.

Running both

Many teams keep their CAFM for work orders and planned maintenance tasks, and use ExpiryEdge for the things a CAFM is not designed to chase: statutory due dates with evidence, documents from contractors who will not log into a portal, insurance and lease dates, and an audit trail for each building.

• CAFM: helpdesk, work orders, PPM tasks, asset and space data

• ExpiryEdge: inspection due dates, contractor certificates, leases, insurance, evidence

• Status changes can be pushed to other systems through the ExpiryEdge API and webhooks

Moving from a spreadsheet

Start with what you already have: one row per inspection per building, with last date, interval, contractor and owner. Import it, check the owners, and set a reminder cadence per inspection type. Then send each contractor a link for their latest certificate, so the evidence lands on the record.

• Import buildings and inspection dates from Excel or CSV

• Set the cadence per inspection type (e.g. 90/60/30/7 days)

• Request the current certificate from each contractor by link