Maintenance Log and Address Book
The Maintenance Log
The Maintenance Log tracks equipment faults, repairs and servicing for the Area.
Record the fault, what was done, and when. Keep servicing in it too — extraction cleaning, gas safety checks, refrigeration servicing, probe calibration.
Why it matters for food safety. A fridge that has been repaired three times in six months is not a maintenance problem, it is a food safety problem waiting to happen, and the log is the only place that pattern is visible. In the moment, the third failure looks like the first.
It also answers a question inspectors ask directly: if a unit was running warm, what did you do about it? "We called someone" is weak. A dated log entry naming the engineer, the fault and the fix is not.
Link it to your temperature records mentally. A critical temperature flag and a maintenance entry on the same day tell one coherent story: the problem was found, the cause was addressed, the unit came back into range.
The Address Book
The Address Book stores suppliers and contractors for the site — name, contact details, what they do.
Worth adding:
- Food suppliers
- Your pest control contractor
- Refrigeration and equipment engineers
- Gas and electrical contractors
- Extraction cleaning
- Waste collection
- Your local Environmental Health office
It feeds your delivery notes. Suppliers added here are suggested as you type on a delivery note, which keeps supplier names spelled the same way every time. That consistency is what makes a later search for one supplier's deliveries actually return them all.
Why Bother With Either
Both are unglamorous, and both are the difference between a bad hour and a bad week.
At six on a Friday with a walk-in failing, the useful things are the engineer's number without hunting through someone's phone, and a record showing this is the third failure — because that is the point where the answer stops being another repair and starts being a replacement.