The Classification Decides Who Acts Next
In Victoria, whether a maintenance request is urgent is not a judgement about how cross the person on the phone is. It is a legal classification with a closed list behind it, and it decides something more consequential than a due date. If the repair is urgent and you do not do it, the renter may have it done and send you the bill. If it is not urgent and you do not do it within fourteen days, the renter may ask the regulator to investigate you. Same request, same silence, two entirely different next moves — and the thing that selects between them is a category.
A category with a statute behind it
Section 3 of the Residential Tenancies Act 1997 defines urgent repairs as any work necessary to repair or remedy a specific list of things. It is a list, not a standard — you do not reason about urgency, you check membership.
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Water and waste
A burst water service. A blocked or broken lavatory system. A serious roof leak. Flooding or serious flood damage.
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Energy and fire
A gas leak. A dangerous electrical fault. Serious storm or fire damage.
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Essential services
A failure or breakdown of any essential service or appliance provided for hot water, water, cooking, heating or laundering — and separately, a failure or breakdown of the gas, electricity or water supply itself.
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Cooling
A failure or breakdown of any cooling appliance or cooling service provided by the rental provider. Its own limb, added separately from heating.
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Standards and safety devices
A failure to comply with any rental minimum standards. A failure or breakdown of any safety-related device, including a smoke alarm or a pool fence.
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Waste of water
An appliance, fitting or fixture provided by the rental provider that uses or supplies water and is malfunctioning in a way that results, or will result, in a substantial amount of water being wasted.
The list runs past that point in the Act itself and this is not the whole of it — read section 3 rather than this summary before you classify anything. But the shape is already clear, and two of the limbs are worth noticing. <em>A failure to comply with any rental minimum standards</em> makes a compliance gap an urgent repair, with no breakdown involved. And a malfunctioning fitting that wastes a substantial amount of water is urgent because of what it costs the world, not because of what it costs the renter.
What follows from the classification
Here is the part that makes this different from an ordinary service target. Under section 72, a renter who has taken reasonable steps to get the provider or their agent to carry out urgent repairs immediately, and who is unable to get them to do it, <em>may arrange the repairs themselves</em>. They must then give seven days written notice of the repairs carried out and the cost. The provider is liable to reimburse the reasonable cost, or a greater prescribed amount if one is prescribed, whichever is less — and must reimburse within seven days after receiving written notice of the repairs and their cost.
For repairs that are not urgent, section 74 goes a different way. The renter gives written notice, and if the provider has not carried out the repairs within fourteen days of that notice, the renter may apply to the Director to investigate whether the provider is in breach of the duty to keep the premises in good repair. Both the application and the Director's report must be in writing, and either may be made electronically.
If it was urgent
- The renter may arrange the repair themselves, once they have tried to get you to do it and could not.
- They give you seven days written notice of what was done and what it cost.
- You are liable for the reasonable cost, or a prescribed greater amount, whichever is less.
- You must reimburse within seven days of receiving that notice.
- A tradesperson you did not choose has been in the property.
If it was not urgent
- The renter gives you written notice that repairs are required.
- Fourteen days run from that notice, not from your ticket.
- If the repairs are not carried out, the renter may apply to the Director.
- The Director may investigate whether you are in breach of your duty to maintain.
- The next document in the file is written by a regulator.
A service level tells you when a request is late. This classification tells you who is allowed to act when it is.
What this product does with a classified request
The mechanism for holding two classes of request with two different clocks exists and works. A support category carries its own first-response and resolution targets in minutes, plus a setting choosing whether those minutes are elapsed time or business hours, and a nightly job reports what has breached. We have written about expressing a statutory period as a category setting <a href="/blog/the-complaint-that-starts-no-clock">elsewhere</a> and the argument holds here: make one category for urgent repairs and one for the rest, set the minutes from the Act rather than from a service promise, and the clocks do the right thing.
What the mechanism does not carry is the consequence. A ticket in this product has a reference, a subject, a description, a queue, a requester, a priority, four timestamps and a count of reopenings. It has no cost field. And an expense — which is where a repair bill would live — carries an expense number, a free-text category, a supplier, a project, an account, an amount, a tax amount, a currency, a date, a paid-or-unpaid status, a payment method and the day it was paid. It has no reference to a ticket. A search across every migration in the product for a foreign key to a ticket returns the ticket's own tables and nothing else.
What section 72 produces, and where each piece would live
| The fact | Recordable today | Attached to the request | On a clock |
|---|---|---|---|
| The request, dated and classified | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| The steps taken to get the provider to act | Yes | Yes | No |
| The renter's written notice of the repair and its cost | Partly — configurable by you | Partly — configurable by you | No |
| The cost itself, as money | Yes | No | No |
| Whether that cost exceeded the prescribed amount | No | No | No |
| The seven days you have to reimburse | No | No | No |
| The reimbursement, once made | Yes | No | Yes |
Built and maintained Configurable by you, not maintained by us Not built
Rows four and seven are green in the first column and red in the second, and that pairing is the whole finding: the money is perfectly recordable and it lands in a different module from the request that caused it. An expense knows about suppliers and projects. It does not know about tickets, and nothing else in the product does either.
A clock that starts on their paperwork
The seven days to reimburse run from the day you receive the renter's written notice — a document produced by the other party, arriving by post or email, and having nothing to do with when anybody opened a record. That is the same shape we ran into in Canada, where a two-day reporting duty <a href="/blog/two-days-from-when-you-knew">runs from the day you became aware</a>, and it has the same answer: the date the document arrived is a fact somebody has to enter, because no system can infer it. What differs here is that the deadline is a payment rather than a report, and payments in this product live where suppliers live rather than where requests do.
Two classes of request with two different targets
A support category carries its own first-response and resolution minutes, and a switch choosing elapsed time or business hours.
A breach that reports itself
A scheduled job walks overdue tickets on both clocks and marks each breach so it shows in the dashboards and reports.
A full conversation trail on the request
Comments, watchers, attachments, a reopen count and a resolution signature against the person who asked.
The repair cost as money
An expense with a supplier, an account, a tax amount, a currency, a date, a payment method and the day it was paid.
A link from the cost to the request
Nothing outside the ticket family references a ticket, so a repair bill and the request it answers are two records with no relation between them.
A cap tested against the amount
A reimbursement limited to the lesser of the reasonable cost and a prescribed figure is a comparison nothing performs.
A deadline for money going out
The clocks in this product measure a response and a resolution; an obligation to pay within a period of a document arriving has no clock of its own.
A property as the thing being maintained
A request records who asked; the premises it concerns would be a relation to an asset or a property record.
Four questions for a system that will run statutory maintenance
Can two classes of request have different deadlines?
What you will probably hear
Yes, by category or by priority.
How to read it
Good, and ask which. Priority is a judgement somebody makes under pressure; a category is a classification you can define against a statute and audit afterwards. For a list-based legal definition you want the category, and you want the list on the screen where the classification is made.
Where does the cost of a repair attach?
What you will probably hear
To the expense, or to the work order.
How to read it
Ask whether it attaches to the request. In most systems, ours included, the money lives with suppliers and the request lives with support, and nothing joins them — which means "what did this maintenance request cost" is a question nobody can answer from the records.
Can a deadline run against us for paying somebody?
What you will probably hear
We track invoice due dates.
How to read it
A due date on an invoice you raised is not the same as a statutory period to reimburse, which starts when a document arrives. Ask whether an arrival date can be recorded and a deadline computed from it, because the diary entry somebody makes instead is the thing that gets missed.
What stops a request being reclassified quietly?
What you will probably hear
The audit log.
How to read it
Worth checking, because here the classification decides who may act next. Ask whether a change of category is visible on the request itself rather than only in a log somebody would have to go looking for, and whether the original classification survives.
Our take
Two categories, minutes set from the Act rather than from a service promise, and the urgent list pinned somewhere the person classifying can read it — that gets you most of the way today, and the clocks and the breach reporting are real. The gap worth commissioning is not a clock at all. It is a relation: a repair cost that knows which request it answers, so a reimbursement can be tested against a cap and against a seven-day period that started when a letter arrived. That is one nullable column and one date, and without it the two halves of every urgent repair sit in different modules and only reconcile in somebody's memory.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Request categories with their own targets, a first-response and a resolution figure in minutes per category, chosen independently of priority.
- A clock that can run on business hours, counting only the organization's working time on the days it works, or on plain elapsed time, per category.
- Breaches detected and reported on a schedule, with a marker on each clock so an overdue request appears in the dashboards rather than waiting to be noticed.
- A complete request trail — comments, watchers, attachments, a reopen count and a resolution signature from the person who asked.
- A repair cost as a first-class expense, with a supplier, an account, a tax amount, a currency, a payment method and the date it was paid.
- A pause while a request waits on the requester, resuming with the time it had left rather than restarting.
- Custom fields on both requests and expenses, so a reference tying the two together can be recorded, reported and exported today.
More we can add to your workspace
- A relation between a cost and the request that caused it, so what a maintenance request cost is a query rather than a reconstruction.
- A cap tested at the moment of reimbursement, comparing an amount against a prescribed figure and showing which of the two applies.
- A deadline on money going out, started by the arrival of a document and reported the way a service breach already is.
- A date a document was received, held as its own field beside the day a record was created.
- The premises or asset a request concerns, as a relation rather than a description.
- A classification history on a request, so a change of category is visible on the record itself alongside who made it and when.
- A statutory reference on a category, so the definition behind a classification travels with the queue that uses it.
Where we point you to a specialist
- We will not classify a repair for you. Whether a particular fault falls inside the section 3 list is the decision the whole scheme turns on, and it decides whether a renter may spend your money without asking. That is a judgement for a property manager who has read the Act, and the useful thing software can do is put the list in front of them at the moment they choose, and keep a record of what they chose and why.
- We will not compute the reimbursable amount. It is the lesser of the reasonable cost and a prescribed figure, "reasonable" is a standard rather than a number, and the prescribed figure lives in the Regulations rather than in the Act. We can hold the cap you tell us applies and show the comparison; the figure and its currency are yours to supply and to keep current.
- We hold a position on where a statutory classification belongs, and it is on the category rather than on the priority field. Priority is what somebody felt at the time and it gets changed to move a queue along. A category with a statutory definition attached is auditable, and when the classification decides who is allowed to act next, being able to show what you classified it as — and when — is worth more than being able to sort by urgency.
The first item is a nullable column and it is the one everything else needs — attach a cost to the request and the second and third become straightforward, because a cap is a comparison and a deadline is a date plus a period. The fourth is the same small date field we would build for any obligation that starts when somebody else's document arrives, and it pays for itself across several of them. The fifth is a relation and is worth doing at the same time if you manage premises. The sixth and seventh are small and belong with whichever of the others goes first.
What we can build for your market on top of the standard product
Everything listed above as something we can add describes what ships in the standard product today — it is a starting point for your market, not a limit on what AWRA OpsHub can do there. Kenya's eTIMS integration and its maintained payroll engine are in the product because Kenyan clients needed them and commissioned them; neither appeared by itself. The same door is open here. If a local payroll engine, a rate with a date on it, a bank or mobile money feed, a statutory return format, a rule specific to how your operation runs, or a link to a system you already have is what stands between you and a decision, tell us and we will scope it as a build — written spec, timeline and price — before you commit to anything.
Dated rates and the periods your obligations actually use
Effective-dated tax rates, so a document raised about a past period is computed against the rate that applied then rather than the rate that applies now, and a credit note that carries the tax split of the supply it reverses. Where a jurisdiction operates a sales-monitoring or fiscalisation scheme, data produced in the published format alongside the approved equipment rather than in place of it.
Banks, payments and pay periods that are not months
Bank statement feeds and local payment rails wired into the Payments Register, and a payroll period that matches your statutory pay cycle rather than the calendar month our schema assumes today. The second is a data-model change and we would quote it as one.
The operational work, which is what most commissions actually are
An extra approval stage in a chain that does not match the standard one, a custom field set on employees or assets that only your sector needs, an expiry that has to block an order rather than send an email, a report your board asks for in a shape nothing produces, or a scanner or weighbridge feeding the goods-in door. These are the commissions we are asked for most often and the smallest ones we quote — and unlike a revenue-authority pipeline, none of them waits on a regulator.
Payroll and statutory returns
Income tax, superannuation or provident fund contributions computed on live employee records against your own pay cycle, with the returns produced in the layout your authority expects.
Systems you already run
The accounting package, CRM, online store or custom database you intend to keep — connected through our API so a fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed.
How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. No roadmap slide, and no pretending in a demo that something exists when it does not.
Tell us what you need integratedTell us what your classification decides
When a category selects a deadline, a settings screen is enough. When it selects who may act next, the classification itself becomes the record worth protecting. If you run maintenance across premises, <a href="/blog/property-maintenance-work-orders">work-order control for property managers</a> covers the operational half of this.
Talk to us about your workspace