How to set up recurring maintenance bookings

Calira’s maintenance tracking features let you block out time on the equipment calendar for maintenance activities: calibrations, cleaning, repairs, and preventative servicing. This keeps researchers from booking instruments during maintenance windows and gives you a clear record of when maintenance occurred.

How maintenance bookings work

Maintenance bookings are a special booking type in Calira. When you create a booking and select “Maintenance” as the type, additional fields appear:

• Provider: Internal (your own team) or External (a service provider)
• Maintenance type: choose from: Preventative Maintenance, Cleaning, Calibration, Breakdown, Repair, or Other

Maintenance bookings automatically have zero cost. Pricing rules, add-on charges, and project allocations are not applied, so maintenance activities do not affect your financial reports.

Who can create maintenance bookings?

Lab administrators can always create maintenance bookings through the booking system.

Researchers can create maintenance bookings (but not recurring maintenance bookings) if a lab administrator has enabled this option. To enable it:

1. Go to Lab Settings > Advanced
2. Toggle on Maintenance for Researchers

This setting is available on Premium and Enterprise plans. It is off by default. When enabled, researchers see the maintenance booking option in the Advanced Booking modal. The same access group and booking rules apply as for standard bookings.

Creating a maintenance booking

1. Open the booking calendar for the equipment that needs maintenance
2. Click on the time slot to open the booking modal
3. In the Advanced Booking view, set Type to Maintenance
4. Select the Provider (Internal or External)
5. Choose the Maintenance type from the dropdown
6. Set the start and end time for the maintenance window
7. Submit the booking

The maintenance booking will appear on the calendar, blocking that time slot from other users.

Recurring maintenance schedules

Lab administrators can create recurring maintenance bookings. The repeat options work the same way as for standard bookings (daily, weekly, or a custom interval) and can be set to end after a number of occurrences or on a specific date.

Researchers cannot create recurring maintenance bookings. Even if recurring bookings are enabled for a researcher, that permission applies to standard usage bookings only. When a researcher selects "Maintenance" as the booking type, the recurring option is not available.

For equipment that requires regular scheduled maintenance, you can also use maintenance contracts to track ongoing service agreements and get reminders before they expire. See How to track service contracts and expiry alerts for details.

Viewing maintenance history

Maintenance bookings appear in Calira Reports alongside standard bookings. You can filter by booking type to see only maintenance activity, giving you a clear service history for each instrument. This is useful for compliance, audit trails, and identifying equipment that requires frequent attention.

Maintenance bookings can also be seen on the maintenance tab for each piece of equipment. 

For more on maintenance features, visit the maintenance tracking product page.