Most facilities dashboards show too much. Twenty tiles, a dozen charts, and no clear answer to the only question an executive is actually asking: is this portfolio being run well or not?
Eight numbers cover it. Below is each one, why it matters, how to calculate it, and — more useful — how each can mislead you if you read it on its own.
Pick one date as your reporting anchor and use it everywhere. Requested date is usually right: it reflects when demand arrived, and it doesn't move when a job finally closes months later. Mixing anchors across reports is the fastest way to produce two figures that disagree and lose everyone's trust.
1. Request volume
What: how many requests came in during the period.
Why: it's your demand signal, and the denominator for almost everything else. A rising trend can mean deteriorating assets — or simply that people have started using the system properly, which is a good thing that looks like a bad thing.
Pitfall: volume alone says nothing about performance. Compare month over month and against the same month last year, since a lot of facilities work is seasonal — HVAC in summer, heating and roof leaks in winter.
2. Request-to-work-order conversion
What: the share of requests that became tracked work orders.
How: work orders created ÷ requests submitted.
Why: it tells you whether intake is actually being triaged. A low rate means requests are being denied, duplicated, or quietly ignored — and the ones being ignored are the ones that become complaints.
Pitfall: a rate near 100% isn't automatically good. If literally everything converts, nobody is filtering duplicates or non-issues, and your work-order count is inflated.
3. Completion rate
What: the share of work orders that reached completed/closed.
How: completed ÷ total work orders in the period.
Why: the headline health number, and the one executives fixate on.
Pitfall: this is the most misleading metric on the list, because it's sensitive to how you handle period boundaries. Jobs opened late in the month haven't had time to close, so a busy final week drags the rate down while nothing is actually wrong. Read it alongside aging, never alone.
4. Average response time
What: how long from request to first vendor assignment.
How: mean of (first assignment timestamp − requested timestamp).
Why: this is the best single measure of your team's performance, because it's the part you control. Completion time depends heavily on the vendor and the nature of the job; response time is about whether anyone is paying attention.
Pitfall: segment by priority or the number is meaningless. Emergencies and routine requests averaged together produce a figure that describes neither. Also check whether your clock runs on business hours or wall-clock time — a Friday-evening request shouldn't make Monday morning look like a failure.
5. Average completion time
What: how long from request to completion.
Why: the closest thing to what a tenant or branch manager actually experiences. They don't care when a vendor was assigned; they care when the light got fixed.
Pitfall: averages hide the tail. Nine jobs closed in a day and one that took four months averages out to something reassuring while a real problem sits in the data. Look at the median alongside the mean — if they diverge sharply, the tail is where your story is.
6. Aging / longest open
What: how long your oldest open items have been open, ideally bucketed (0–7 days, 8–30, 31–90, 90+).
Why: this is the metric that catches what the averages hide. Completion rate and average completion time can both look fine while a handful of jobs quietly rot for months — and those are exactly the ones that turn into escalations, complaints, or a much larger repair bill.
Pitfall: almost every portfolio has a few stale records that were completed but never closed out in the system. Investigate the 90+ bucket before you report it — some of it is usually hygiene rather than genuinely stalled work.
7. Top problem categories
What: the ranked breakdown of what's actually breaking.
Why: it's the only metric here that points at a cause rather than measuring throughput. Lighting dominating your list suggests a capital fix — relamping — not a maintenance one. Recurring HVAC at three properties suggests aging equipment, not bad vendors.
Pitfall: this is only as good as your category discipline. If problems were captured as free text, the chart is fragmented across spellings and effectively fictional. Count the distinct values before you trust it — see why reporting breaks for the detail.
8. Vendor turnaround
What: average completion time grouped by vendor, with volume alongside.
Why: it's the most actionable number on the list, because you can change vendors. It also gives you something concrete for the conversation — “your average is eleven days, the other roofing vendor is at four” is far more useful than a general complaint.
Pitfall: always show volume next to it. A vendor with a five-day average on two jobs is not outperforming one with an eight-day average on ninety. And check job mix before drawing conclusions — the vendor who gets all your emergencies will look worse.
Putting them on one page
For a monthly executive view, this ordering tends to work — demand, then throughput, then speed, then cause:
- Top row: request volume, conversion, completion rate, currently open
- Second row: average response, average and median completion, longest open
- Then: top problem categories and vendor turnaround
- Always: prior-period comparison on the headline figures — a number without a trend isn't information
Anything beyond that belongs in a drill-down, not the summary page. The discipline is deciding what not to show.
Two things not to do
Don't set targets before you have a baseline. Committing to a “two-day average completion” before you know your current distribution invites gaming — and the easiest way to hit a completion-time target is to close jobs early and let people re-report them.
Don't report a metric you can't act on. If nobody would do anything differently based on a number, it's decoration. Cut it and the page gets more useful.
These are, more or less, the metrics Bedrok Pro shows by default — request and work-order volume, conversion, completion rate, response and completion times with fastest and slowest, longest open, problem and priority breakdowns, and vendor share — all derived from the underlying dates rather than typed in, filterable by date range and category, and clickable through to the work orders behind any figure.
See the dashboards, or bring a month of your own data and we'll compute these on your portfolio.
One closing suggestion: pick three of these, not eight, for your first reporting cycle. Volume, average response, and aging will tell you most of what you need — and a report people actually read every month beats a comprehensive one they skim once.