Content
- What is the difference between preventive maintenance and a maintenance plan?
- Why Excel is widely used for maintenance planning
- Benefits of using Excel
- When spreadsheets stop working
- Checklist: Evaluating Excel for SMEs
- Moving to maintenance software
- The Maintastic CMMS for SMEs
- Excel-based preventive maintenance plans vs. Maintastic CMMS
- Conclusion: A matter of maintenance maturity
Preventive maintenance plan in Excel: Why spreadsheets fail and when SMEs should switch to maintenance software
Maintenance in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is often the result of historical growth – pragmatic, functional, and built around existing tools. However, as companies scale or expectations around processes, transparency, and reliability change, many maintenance managers and planners begin to question whether their maintenance setup is still future-ready.
This article is aimed at SMEs with a manageable maintenance organization, multiple machines or assets, and possibly additional production sites that already use Excel for preventive maintenance planning or are currently evaluating whether spreadsheets are suitable for this purpose. The article provides context by:
- explaining the difference between preventive maintenance and a maintenance plan,
- outlining the benefits of using Excel,
- illustrating, with the help of a checklist, when spreadsheets reach their limits for preventive maintenance planning,
- offering guidance on the decision to move to maintenance software,
- and providing orientation for SMEs looking to take the next step in the further development of their maintenance processes.
Preventive maintenance (PM) refers to all activities aimed at maintaining the intended condition of machines, equipment, and other technical assets. While preventive maintenance addresses the question of what needs to be done, a maintenance plan provides the structure and accountability for execution by defining when, how, and by whom maintenance activities are carried out. A maintenance plan consolidates all relevant information required for systematic implementation. Its level of detail may vary depending on the organization, but typical elements include:
- Maintenance object: machine, equipment, vehicle, or asset, including master data
- Maintenance tasks: e.g., inspection, cleaning, lubrication, adjustment, replacement
- Intervals: e.g., weekly, monthly, quarterly, or based on operating hours
- Responsibilities: who performs the maintenance tasks
- Scheduling: fixed dates or recurring cycles
- Documentation: date, result, deviations, confirmation
Beyond organizational aspects, maintenance planning plays a critical role in operational safety, reliability, and regulatory compliance. Regularly and consistently executed maintenance activities help ensure the long-term safe operation of machines and equipment while reducing risks to employees, products, and ongoing operations. In regulated industries such as food and beverage production, structured maintenance and hygiene documentation is also a key component of HACCP-based safety concepts and a prerequisite for meeting quality and safety standards.
Why Excel is widely used for maintenance planning in SMEs
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) form the backbone of many economies, particularly in the European Union. They account for the majority of businesses, employ a significant share of the workforce, secure jobs, and contribute substantially to industrial value creation.1
However, the operating conditions of SMEs differ markedly from those of large enterprises, particularly when it comes to digital connectivity and system landscapes. While large organizations widely rely on enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, SMEs are far less digitally integrated.2 A similar pattern can be observed in the implementation of digital initiatives overall, with only a minority of companies having achieved a high level of digital maturity.
Differences also emerge in innovation activities. As company size increases, so do available resources and the ability to invest in structured innovation efforts. Smaller organizations tend to focus more strongly on product innovation, while process innovation often plays a secondary role.
These structural differences have a direct impact on internal processes. When digital integration and process innovation are less prevalent, SMEs adopt a highly pragmatic approach to using available resources. Excel is used in controlling for reporting, in procurement for demand overviews, and in production for order planning. Rather than introducing specialized software for every organizational task, existing tools are adapted and extended to additional departments and use cases, including maintenance planning.
Benefits of using Excel to create a preventive maintenance plan
For many SMEs, using Excel for maintenance planning initially offers clear advantages. In small teams and with manageable asset structures, Excel enables a quick and straightforward entry into structured maintenance planning. The key benefits of using Excel to create a preventive maintenance plan include:
- Immediate availability: Excel is already available in most organizations and can be used without additional investment.
- Low barrier to entry: Employees are familiar with the tool from other business areas, and formal training or implementation projects are typically neither required nor planned.
- High flexibility: Spreadsheets can be customized individually, for example by adding columns for maintenance intervals, responsibilities, or comments.
- Fast implementation: Maintenance plans can be created, modified, and expanded quickly without relying on IT departments or external service providers.
- Transparency for small structures: With a limited number of machines and maintenance tasks, Excel provides a clear overview of upcoming activities.
- Downloadable templates: Pre-configured Excel templates for maintenance plans are widely available online, making it easier to get started.
- Analysis and visualization: With appropriate data maintenance, maintenance data stored in Excel can be used for basic analysis and reporting.
As a result, Excel and spreadsheets represent a sensible first step toward making maintenance activities in small and medium sized enterprises more structured, traceable, and manageable.
When Excel and spreadsheets stop working for maintenance planning
Using Excel to set up a preventive maintenance plan and support maintenance planning activities can work well for many SMEs for a certain period of time. However, the situation changes as scope, complexity, and organizational requirements increase. In practice, this shift rarely happens overnight but rather becomes noticeable gradually in day-to-day work.
A growing number of machines
As the number of machines and equipment increases or as maintenance activities are spread across multiple production areas, halls, or sites, the effort required to maintain Excel-based maintenance plans rises significantly. Maintenance plans become larger, less transparent, and more prone to errors.
Multiple people involved
As soon as multiple employees, like planners and technicians, work with the same maintenance plan, or external service providers are involved, the coordination effort increases. Version conflicts, duplicate entries, and missing feedback become common issues.
Manual maintenance and lack of automation
Reminders, overdue tasks, or escalations must be monitored manually in Excel. As a result, the effectiveness of the maintenance plan depends heavily on the consistency and attention of individual users, increasing the risk of missed or delayed actions.
Limited traceability
Histories of completed maintenance activities, recurring failures, or spare parts used can be recorded in Excel, but the data is often stored in an unstructured way. Analyzing this information requires additional manual workload, and maintaining a consistent, end-to-end maintenance history becomes increasingly difficult.
Documentation and compliance requirements
Rising requirements for documentation – such as for audits, inspections, or internal reporting – call for complete, consistent, and traceable records. In Excel, information is typically spread across multiple files or worksheets. Changes are not always clearly traceable, which limits revision safety and makes reliable documentation harder to ensure.
Lack of integration with other processes
An Excel-based maintenance plan is typically not integrated with other operational processes. As a result, information on spare parts, work orders, or maintenance feedback exists in isolation, leading to manual handoffs and fragmented workflows.
Checklist for SMEs
The following checklist helps assess whether Excel is still sufficient in your organization for creating and managing preventive maintenance plans, or whether the organizational effort required for effective maintenance planning has already increased noticeably.
Evaluating Excel for preventive maintenance plans and maintenance planning
Organization & collaboration
- Multiple employees, such as planners or technicians, access the same maintenance plan at the same time
- External service providers are involved in maintenance activities
- Different versions of Excel maintenance plans are in circulation
- Feedback on completed maintenance tasks is delayed or missing
Planning & reliability
- Maintenance planning and schedules must be monitored manually
- There are no reminders or escalations for overdue maintenance tasks
- Maintenance activities are occasionally forgotten or postponed
Data maintenance & error risk
- Maintenance plan data is entered or updated manually
- Formula errors, missing entries, or incomplete information occur
- The reliability of maintenance plans depends heavily on individual users
Transparency & traceability
- Visibility into open, ongoing, and completed maintenance tasks is limited
- Maintenance histories stored in Excel maintenance plans are difficult to trace or spread across multiple files or folders
- Analyses of frequencies, downtime, or root causes require manual consolidation across maintenance plans
Mobility & practical usability
- Maintenance is performed on site, but maintenance plans are updated later in the office
- Technicians or service staff do not have mobile access to maintenance plans
Documentation & requirements
- Maintenance and inspection reports are required for audits, certifications, or internal reporting
- Manual documentation within Excel maintenance plans increasingly consumes time and attention
Key takeaway
The more of these statements apply to your situation, the clearer it becomes that Excel is reaching its organizational limits as a maintenance planner – and that moving to maintenance software is a sensible next step.
Moving from Excel and spreadsheets to maintenance software
For SMEs, moving from preventive maintenance plans based on Excel and spreadsheets to maintenance software represents an important step in the further development of their maintenance practices. The focus is not on digitalization for its own sake, but on accurately mapping existing processes with the goal of maximizing equipment availability, preventing functional failures, and ensuring the planned service life of assets.
For maintenance managers and planners in small and medium-sized enterprises, it is crucial that maintenance software does not have to be approached as a complex IT project. A transition is particularly advisable when the solution:
- builds on existing maintenance structures,
- offers intuitive usability with minimal training effort,
- makes maintenance activities more transparent and binding for multiple stakeholders,
- and brings planning, execution, and documentation together in a single system.
Highly complex systems whose functional scope is primarily designed for large enterprises are often perceived as an additional burden in this context. As a result, they tend to face lower user acceptance and frequently fail during the implementation of maintenance software in SMEs.
The Maintastic CMMS for SMEs
Maintastic is an example of a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) that takes into account the requirements of small and medium-sized enterprises. The software helps SMEs organize their maintenance activities digitally and efficiently. Instead of relying on Excel, paper-based processes, or overly complex systems, Maintastic offers an intuitive, mobile-first solution that is cloud-based and ready to use in a very short time.
With its integrated maintenance planning functionality, Maintastic enables users to plan, manage, and monitor maintenance activities, inspections, and repairs. Typical day-to-day use cases include:
- planning maintenance activities based on defined time intervals,
- setting priorities and individual task durations,
- assessing the urgency of maintenance activities using a traffic-light logic,
- gaining greater day-to-day transparency through filters,
- and ensuring full traceability of all completed work through the asset history.
Beyond maintenance planning, Maintastic also supports additional maintenance tasks
Asset Management
Management of machines, equipment, or components, including master data, serial numbers, and location information.
Ticketing System
Capturing faults and issues with descriptions, images, videos, or easily via AI-powered voice input directly at the asset using QR codes.
Work Orders
Overview of all open, in-progress, and completed work orders, including status, deadlines, and feedback.
Instructions & Checklists
Providing checklists, inspection reports, and maintenance instructions for standardized working procedures (SOPs).
CMMS App
Mobile access to essential features, including reporting issues using AI-supported voice input, processing work orders, capturing feedback, completing checklists, and viewing asset history.
External Collaboration
Collaborating with machine manufacturers via live video and chat in the direct context of machines, issue reports, and work orders.
Interfaces
Monitoring conditions via IoT systems and automatically generating tickets.
Integration
Integration with existing ERP systems to enable automated data flows for master data, product trees, and work orders.
Try the Maintastic CMMS for free and without obligation
Discover the key CMMS features for your maintenance organization. Start your 14-day cloud-based trial today.
The CMMS is successfully used today across a wide range of industries, including general manufacturing, process industries, construction and mining, food production, transportation and logistics, as well as defense and security.
Comparison of Excel-based preventive maintenance plans and the Maintastic CMMS
The following comparison highlights key differences between Excel-based preventive maintenance plans and the Maintastic CMMS. In addition, it provides a holistic view of how maintenance activities are supported under each approach. The table is based on a factual assessment of the respective capabilities and limitations and has been prepared to the best of our knowledge.
| Category | Excel- / Paper-Based Maintenance Plans | Maintastic CMMS | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Getting Started & Scalability | |||||||||
| Implementation | Immediate use possible, no implementation required |
Fast onboarding without an IT project in a cloud-based setup |
|||||||
| Scalability | Technically not limited, but increasingly difficult to coordinate as the number of machines and users grows |
Not limited by the number of machines or users |
|||||||
| License Costs | No direct licensing costs |
User-based licensing model; cost-efficient access for additional departments via so-called light users |
|||||||
| Best suited for | Simple and manageable structures, few users and machines |
SMEs with multiple users, machines, or production sites |
|||||||
| Training / Onboarding | No formal training required, but high effort for explanations and coordination |
Intuitive onboarding, optionally supported by ramp-up and training packages |
|||||||
| Planning & Execution | |||||||||
| Maintenance Planning | Manual planning using spreadsheets, adjustments performed manually |
Centralized planning of recurring and one-time maintenance activities |
|||||||
| Reminders & Due Dates | Manual tracking required, no automated reminders |
Due dates, status indicators, and filters for overdue or upcoming maintenance |
|||||||
| Maintenance History | Recording possible, but often spread across multiple files, spreadsheets, or folders |
Maintenance activities, faults, and work orders are directly linked to the asset |
|||||||
| Documentation | Often documented later in the office or paper-based at the machine |
Documentation carried out directly within the workflow via smartphone or tablet |
|||||||
| Spare Parts Management | Separate lists or tables required, no direct link between maintenance, work orders, and spare parts |
Basic linkage of spare parts with assets and work orders |
|||||||
| Access & Mobility | |||||||||
| Multi-User Access | Changes generally possible for all users, prone to version conflicts and issues with parallel usage |
Controlled via user and role concepts with clearly defined permissions |
|||||||
| Mobile Use | Not practical or only very limited |
CMMS app for iOS and Android |
|||||||
| Holistic View of Maintenance | |||||||||
| Asset Management | Basic data can be maintained, no central asset record with linked history |
Centralized management of the entire machine and asset base |
|||||||
| Reactive Maintenance | No structured fault reporting, no system-based ticket context |
Tickets and issue reports directly in the asset context via QR codes |
|||||||
| Planned Maintenance (Preventive Maintenance) |
Can be planned, but is highly dependent on manual data maintenancee | System-based preventive maintenance with checklists, reports, and forms |
|||||||
| Work Orders | Can be represented as lists or tables |
Digital work orders with tasks, deadlines, responsibilities, and closure |
|||||||
| Mobile Maintenance | Only possible via printouts or not practical |
Organization, execution, and documentation of maintenance activities via app |
|||||||
| Autonomous Maintenance | Possible via printouts, but no control over completed work |
Digital work instructions for standardized tasks with feedback options |
|||||||
| Condition-Based Maintenance | Only limited implementation is possible |
Tickets, fault reports, or maintenance orders can be triggered based on events |
|||||||
| Dashboard & Reporting | Generally possible, but dependent on manual data maintenance and preparation |
Dashboards, filters, evaluations, and export functions for maintenance, tickets, and faults; advanced analytics on the roadmap |
|||||||
| Integration with Third-Party Systems | No native integration, data exchange handled manually |
Integration with ERP, IoT, and other systems via a powerful API |
|||||||
As of April 2026
Excel or maintenance software: A matter of maintenance maturity
Will Excel as a maintenance planning tool disappear entirely? Probably not. For simple structures, a limited number of machines and maintenance staff, or as an entry point into maintenance planning, Excel can be a useful and practical tool. Ultimately, however, the decisive factor is less the tool itself and more how maintenance requirements evolve within an organization. As the number of users and assets grows, safety and documentation requirements increase, and additional production sites come into play, where processes need to be standardized and comparable, isolated maintenance planning solutions increasingly reach their limits. In such scenarios, professional maintenance software gains importance, as it takes a holistic view of maintenance and treats it as an integrated process – from planning and execution through to documentation and analysis.
Beyond organizational benefits, qualitative factors also become increasingly relevant. These include preserving technical knowledge through digital documentation, reducing the workload of skilled workers through mobile work orders, improving reaction times in the event of failures, and enabling better coordination between maintenance, production, and external service providers.
The transition from Excel to maintenance software is therefore less a technological decision and more a question of maintenance maturity and a clear step toward future-ready maintenance.
FAQ: Common questions about preventive maintenance plans and maintenance planning for SMEs
Is an Excel maintenance plan sufficient for small and medium-sized enterprises?
An Excel-based maintenance plan can be a sensible starting point for SMEs with manageable structures. As long as only a limited number of machines are involved and a small group of people is responsible, maintenance activities can generally be organized using Excel. As complexity increases, more stakeholders are involved, or documentation requirements grow, Excel increasingly reaches its organizational limits.
When does it make sense to move from Excel to maintenance software?
The transition becomes worthwhile when maintenance activities can no longer be managed reliably through manual planning and control. Typical triggers include increasing requirements for traceability, recurring overdue tasks, or additional production sites where processes need to be standardized and implemented consistently. The decisive factor is less the size of the company and more the maturity of the maintenance organization.
What requirements should maintenance software for SMEs meet?
Maintenance software for SMEs should be easy to use, avoid lengthy implementation projects, and meaningfully build on existing maintenance structures. A professional solution such as Maintastic takes a holistic view of maintenance as a connected process – from planning and execution through to documentation and analysis.
Can Excel fully replace maintenance software for maintenance planning?
Excel can cover individual aspects of preventive maintenance plans and maintenance planning, but it does not replace comprehensive maintenance software. While Excel is a flexible tool, it lacks the systemic integration of planning, execution, documentation, and analysis. For SMEs that want to organize maintenance in a future-proof and scalable way, maintenance software is the right long-term solution.
Take the next step in your maintenance journey
Would you like to find out whether your maintenance planning has reached the next level of maturity? Schedule a personal walkthrough where we show you how the Maintastic CMMS can support your maintenance processes in a practical and meaningful way. Alternatively, you can explore Maintastic on your own and start a 14-day free trial.