Maintenance Scheduling & Team Calendars

When you pick a time slot for a work order, where do those slots come from — and why aren't there more of them? This article answers that. It explains the rule behind the maintenance slot picker, shows you how to create one and attach it to your properties, and walks through the levers that shape availability: working hours, appointment length, the gap between jobs, whole-building versus per-unit calendars, routing to a team, and blackout dates. Once you understand the rule, every slot the picker shows makes sense. No prior REDA experience is assumed.

How maintenance scheduling works

A Calendar Slot Rule is a small record that describes availability. One field decides what kind of scheduling it drives: Applicable For, which is Showing, Booking, or Maintenance. This article is about the Maintenance kind — the rule a work order reads to fill its slot picker. (The same engine powers showings and bookings; those have their own articles.)

When you open Create Work Order, REDA loads the property's maintenance rule, lays out its grid of times, subtracts everything unavailable, and shows you what's left. Pick a slot and REDA books it; the work order moves to Scheduled. Rescheduling runs the same picker again.

Creating a maintenance slot rule

From the Calendar Slot Rules tab, click New and describe your availability. The required fields are the shape of your working day:

REDA guards the numeric fields with three checks:

Standard vs. custom slots

The Slot Type decides how the grid is built:

• Standard (the default) walks your working hours in even steps of the slot duration — a simple, evenly spaced grid.
• Custom lets you hand-define specific windows instead. Each custom slot is a child row on the rule with a Start Time and End Time (which must sit inside the rule's available hours) and a Maximum Events Per Slot (default 1) — its capacity. A custom window stays offered until it holds that many appointments, then disappears.

Custom windows are validated against the rule's hours:

Unit-level vs. building-level availability

Slot Management decides whose calendar the busy-check runs against:

• Property — each unit keeps its own calendar; a booking on one unit doesn't affect another.
• Parent — the whole building or community shares one busy calendar; a slot taken on any unit shows as busy across all of them. Use this when one crew services the whole building and can only be in one place at a time.

Routing to your team

Record Assignment names the user or queue that owns the appointments this rule generates — that's the "team" in team calendar. It does double duty: it also acts as a filter on the busy-check, so only the assigned team's own appointments block the team's slots. The rule can also carry an optional shared Calendar Id, plus Day Label and Time Label patterns that format how slots read (falling back to the application defaults).

Attaching the rule to properties

A rule does nothing until a property points at it. Open the property, go to its Details tab, and set the Maintenance Slot Rule field to your new rule. That field only accepts a rule whose Applicable For is Maintenance — which is why setting that on the rule first matters. From then on, every work order on that property draws its slots from this rule.

How availability is calculated

Here's the subtraction, in plain terms, from the rule's grid down to the slots you can pick:

Blackouts (slot exceptions)

A blackout — a slot exception — is a window when maintenance can't be booked, regardless of the rule: an elevator service morning, a public holiday, a building closure. Each blackout has an Unavailable From and Unavailable To, an optional Unavailable Reason shown to schedulers, and a scope. Scope it to a Property, Region, Neighbourhood, or Property Type — or leave the scope blank to apply it everywhere the rule reaches.

REDA checks the dates make sense:

A blackout can repeat. Choose a Recurring Frequency (the same set as elsewhere: DAILY, WEEK, 2 WEEKS, MONTH, 3 MONTHS, 6 MONTHS, YEAR) and set Advance Recur Instances — how many future occurrences to pre-create. Miss that and REDA responds:

Worked example: the Meridian Maintenance Team

The Meridian Maintenance Team services Meridian Court, and one crew covers the whole building. Here's the rule and what it produces:

Now the behavior:

Reference: rule, custom-slot, and blackout fields

Slot rule fields:

Custom slot fields:

Blackout (exception) fields:

Where to go next

1. Work Orders — the record that consumes these slots when you schedule a job.
2. Service Requests — where a maintenance job usually starts.
3. Calendar Slot Rules — the same engine for showings and bookings, in full.
4. Slot Exceptions — blackouts and recurring exceptions in depth.

Frequently asked questions