CMMS and asset finance for local councils

A council runs one of the most varied asset bases of any operator: aquatic and leisure centres, sporting facilities, community halls, libraries, public amenities and the depots and plant that keep them all going. The maintenance burden is spread across many sites, the contractors are many, and the asset base has to be depreciated and reported with care. Cohiva Control is built for operators running physical plant across multiple sites, and it joins the maintenance side to the finance side so the asset your teams service is the asset you depreciate.

One register, many sites

The strength of a council asset base is its breadth, and that is also what makes it hard to keep on top of. Each facility has its own plant, an aquatic centre has pumps and filtration, a hall has HVAC and lighting, a depot has workshop and grounds equipment, and the patterns repeat across the local government area. Cohiva Control records every asset in a single register, tied to its facility, with a stable identity and an immutable code you can attach as a QR label. A worker scans an asset and sees its history, condition and open work, and that code is never reused when equipment is replaced, so the record holds up over the long asset lives councils deal with. Running many sites in one system lets you see maintenance load and cost across the whole estate.

Planned maintenance across the estate

Council facilities need a reliable maintenance rhythm, and keeping it consistent across many sites is the challenge. Cohiva Control schedules preventive maintenance on a time interval or a meter interval, generates work orders automatically, and because that generation is idempotent, a re-run will not create duplicate jobs. Preventive maintenance compliance is tracked against the schedule, so a facilities manager can see which sites are on plan and which need attention.

Reactive work is handled with the same control. Work orders move through a server enforced state machine from open to verified, illegal transitions are rejected, and every change is written to an append only history row, which gives a defensible record for internal audit and public accountability.

Inspections that become work

Routine facility inspections, playground and safety checks and condition assessments are part of council operations. Cohiva Control inspection templates capture pass or fail items, numeric readings, photos and signatures, and a failed item can raise a work order automatically, so a hazard found on an inspection becomes a tracked job rather than a note in a report. Submitted inspections are versioned and immutable.

Contractor compliance, enforced

Councils rely heavily on contractors, and keeping every one current on insurance, licences and inductions is a serious administrative load. Cohiva Control removes the risk of an oversight. A contractor with expired, missing or unverified public liability insurance, a trade licence or a site induction cannot be assigned to a work order. The block is hard, applies on every assignment, and there is no override, even for an administrator. You configure the documents required, and the system enforces them, which helps you comply with your own procurement and work health and safety policies.

Asset finance built in

Councils carry large fixed-asset registers and report on them carefully. Rather than exporting to a separate register, Cohiva Control carries each asset through to native depreciation. It runs six methods, straight line, diminishing value, double declining balance, units of production, sum of years digits and AASB 16 for leases, holds money to the cent rather than as a floating point number, and writes each monthly run to an append only depreciation ledger. The journal can post to Xero, QuickBooks, NetSuite or Cohiva Crunch, so maintenance and finance work from one record per asset.

Australian built for the public sector context

Cohiva Control is Australian built and supports AASB 16 lease accounting. It is database per tenant, so each operator runs in an isolated database, and a council can manage its full estate of facilities in the one platform.

Part of the Cohiva platform

Cohiva Control is part of the wider Cohiva platform. Councils running aquatic and leisure facilities often pair it with Cohiva Complex, and finance teams connect to Cohiva Crunch for the general ledger. See the whole platform at www.cohiva.app.