How to keep your equipment serviced by hours

Settings → Tools → Equipment. Keep each machine's hour meter, add service plans every so many hours or months, and make a service job for each one due.

Updated 2026-10-25

For your own mowers, blowers, trimmers and plows: keep each machine's hour meter, and Otto works out when each service is due, e.g. an oil change every 50 hours or a winter service every 12 months. It is part of Jobs, so Jobs must be switched on. For equipment your customers own, such as a furnace, use records on the customer instead.

Where

Your name at the bottom of the menu → Settings → Tools → Equipment → Open. The card shows for field service and trades businesses.

Add a machine

Only an owner or admin can do this.

1. Under Equipment, type its name, e.g. Mower 2, and if you like its kind, its serial number and what its hour meter reads.
2. Press Add.

Add a service plan

1. Under the machine, press Add a service plan.
2. Name the service, e.g. Oil change, and type Every how many hours, Every how many months, or both.
3. Type Last done at (hours) if it was not done at today's reading.
4. Press Save plan.

A service is due when the meter reaches the last reading plus the hours, or when the last date plus the months comes, whichever is first. It is listed as coming up within 10 hours or 30 days of that.

Read the meter

Anyone on the team with Jobs can do this. Type what the meter reads beside the machine and press Save reading. The meter only goes up.

Service jobs

Under Due and coming up, press Make service jobs. Each due service gets one job under Jobs, filed under your business, with the reading and serial number in its notes. A service that already has an open job does not get a second one.

When the work is done, either mark the job done on the job sheet, or press Done today beside the service. Either way the service is recorded as done at the meter's reading, and the next one is worked out from there.

Good to know

• Out of service takes a machine off the due list. Its plans are kept.
• Removing a service plan does not remove a job already made for it.

If it doesn't work

• "The meter last read 251.5 hours. Check the reading." The reading is lower than the last one.
• "Say every how many hours, every how many months, or both." A plan needs at least one.
• Add, Add a service plan and Make service jobs are missing: only an owner or admin sees them.