Facility management software in Australia: statutory maintenance, contractors and SLAs

What does a facility manager need that the CMMS doesn’t give?

A view across buildings, states and contractors of what the law requires and what the client was promised, with the evidence attached. Your CMMS knows the assets and the work orders. It usually doesn’t know that a building in Parramatta has its fire safety statement due in six weeks, that the Melbourne site’s essential safety measures records must be produced within 24 hours if the fire brigade asks, or that the electrician booked for Thursday has an expired insurance certificate.

This page is written from the building owner’s and facility manager’s side, across trades. The fire and HVAC contractors who do the testing have their own systems; what you need is the layer that holds them to account.

What goes in a statutory maintenance calendar?

Every recurring obligation per building, each with its owner, its due date, the work orders that evidence it and the place the result must be sent or kept. The rules differ by state, which is why a single national CMMS schedule rarely captures them.

Obligation	Where	What your system must track
Annual fire safety statement (AFSS)	NSW	Due within 12 months of the previous statement or final certificate; lodged within 3 months of the inspection; sent to council and Fire and Rescue NSW; displayed in the building
Annual essential safety measures report	Victoria	Prepared each year on the approved form; maintenance records kept on site; available within 24 hours of a request
Asbestos register and management plan	All states, under WHS laws	Current register per building, shown to contractors before work
Building Energy Efficiency Certificate	National, for offices of 1,000 m² or more being sold or leased	Certificate currency against leasing activity
Other states’ fire safety maintenance regimes	Qld, SA, WA, Tas, ACT, NT	Each state’s equivalent, mapped the same way

The NSW AFSS has two clocks that matter. City of Ryde explains the statement must be submitted within 12 months of the previous one and lodged within 3 months of the date of inspection and assessment, and each essential fire safety measure must have been assessed by a properly qualified person. That means the inspection has to be booked early enough, and the calendar must alert on both dates.

Victoria’s rules sit in the Building Regulations 2018. The owner must prepare an annual essential safety measures report, may authorise an agent such as a maintenance contractor to complete it, and must keep records of maintenance checks and repairs available for the municipal building surveyor or the fire brigade chief officer within 24 hours of a request. Victoria’s Building and Plumbing Commission publishes a template for the annual report. If records live in a contractor’s portal rather than yours, you may not be able to meet that 24 hour window.

How should asbestos and WHS duties show up in software?

At the point of work, not in a filing cabinet. Safe Work Australia says that if there is asbestos at a workplace you must manage the risks, including keeping an asbestos register and an asbestos management plan, and that construction work likely to disturb asbestos is high risk construction work needing a safe work method statement.

So a work order for anything that touches walls, ceilings, roofs or plant in a building with asbestos should show the register entries for that area to the contractor, require acknowledgement before the job starts, and require a SWMS where the work is high risk. Store each acknowledgement with the job.

Which CMMS, and what goes on top?

Pick the CMMS for the maintenance work, then decide what it won’t do well. MEX is an Australian CMMS covering work requests, inspections, inventory and multi site maintenance, with mobile apps and integrations. Maintenance Connection, Planon and Ezymaint are other options to compare, and ServiceNow appears where an organisation already runs it for IT and wants one workflow platform.

Need	CMMS alone	CMMS plus a custom layer
Preventive maintenance and work orders	Yes	Yes
Statutory dates per state and building	Partial, as scheduled tasks	Full, with lodgement and display tracking
Contractor licences, insurances and inductions	Varies, often basic	Checked automatically before dispatch
Client SLA reports across several CMMS or sites	Limited	Yes, from a shared data layer
Energy and sensor data	Limited	Yes, joined to assets

How do you keep contractors in line?

Check every contractor against the work before the work order goes out, and keep checking. The list for each contractor and site is short but tedious: trade licence for the work type, public liability and workers’ compensation insurance, site induction, asbestos acknowledgement where relevant, SWMS for high risk work, and for some sites a working with children check.

A contractor compliance portal lets contractors upload their own documents, reads expiry dates, reminds them before lapse, and blocks dispatch when something is missing. Your FM team stops chasing PDFs and the audit trail builds itself. The model WHS laws place duties on everyone with management or control of a workplace, so this is your evidence, not just the contractor’s.

What does energy disclosure ask of your data?

Energy data good enough for a NABERS rating and for the Commercial Building Disclosure program when an office is leased or sold. The CBD program requires energy efficiency information in most cases when commercial office space of 1,000 square metres or more is offered for sale or lease. Penalties under the Building Energy Efficiency Disclosure Act 2010 are expressed in penalty units, which the program notes increased from 1 July 2026.

The software work is usually data engineering: pulling interval data from meters, the BMS and retailer files into one store, keeping it complete for each rating period, and reporting by building and tenancy. Our data analytics and data engineering services cover this.

What should tenants and clients see?

Their requests, their SLAs and the proof, without seeing anyone else’s. A good client and tenant portal lets a tenant raise a request with a photo, see its status, and get a notification when it is done. For the client, it shows response and completion times against the contract, statutory status per building, and monthly reports that generate themselves. Our customer portal guide covers access control and design. Guarding and cleaning contractors should feed the same portal; see our pages on security company software and cleaning company software.

Where do sensors and predictive maintenance pay?

Where a failure is costly, happens often enough to learn from, and gives a warning signal first. Good candidates are cold rooms and freezers, plant room pumps and chillers, water leaks in risers, and lifts where the maintainer already shares data. Poor candidates are cheap assets that rarely fail.

Start with monitoring and alerts on a handful of assets, link each alert to an automatic work order in the CMMS, and only add prediction once you have a year of data and real failure records to test it against.

What about acquisitions and portfolio changes?

Plan for buildings arriving and leaving, because FM portfolios change every year. When you take on a new building, the statutory history matters as much as the asset list: the last AFSS or annual ESM report, the fire safety schedule or ESM determination, the asbestos register and the open defects. A structured onboarding checklist that imports those records, sets the first due dates and assigns owners avoids the most common gap, an obligation nobody knew was due. When a building leaves, export its full record so the next manager starts clean.

What does it cost?

Indicative Australian market ranges, AUD ex GST, for modules over an existing CMMS.

Build	Indicative range
ESM and AFSS compliance tracker across a portfolio	$30k to $90k
Client portal and SLA dashboard over a CMMS	$40k to $120k
Contractor compliance portal	$30k to $80k
Sensor monitoring with CMMS work order integration	$60k to $200k

These cover design, build, testing and launch at Australian agency rates; hosting and maintenance are extra. They are ranges, not quotes.

How AWLabs approaches facility management software

AWLabs hasn’t yet delivered a project for a facility manager, and we aren’t fire safety practitioners or building surveyors; your practitioners and advisers own the statutory interpretation. We build the data, portal and integration layer around your CMMS. The first step is a Development Consult; then a paid Discovery Audit maps your buildings, obligations, contractors and systems, with the fee credited in full against the build. You receive a fixed price Schedule of Work with three options: The Minimum, The Recommended and The Complete. Senior engineers lead every build, updates arrive every Tuesday and Friday, Sydney time, and the code and IP are assigned to you as they are paid for.