Not every defect needs fixing straight away. A hairline crack in a path, a bit of rot starting on a bench, a fence post beginning to lean — none of these need a repair today, but you don't want to forget about them either, because they will get worse. This article covers how to keep a defect under review in Civic.ly so that checking it actually happens.
Don't rely on a status alone
The instinct is to mark the defect as "being monitored" and move on. The trouble is that a status is just a label — nothing in Civic.ly will bring that defect back to you, and nothing puts it on anybody's list. Six months later you have a set of defects you believe are being watched, and no evidence that anyone has looked at them.
The better approach is to schedule the check as a job. A job appears in someone's task list on the day it's due, so the monitoring genuinely happens, and every visit leaves a dated photo behind.
Set up monitoring on a defect
- Open the defect in the web app.
- Leave its Status as Open and set its Priority to Low. This keeps it out of the way of the urgent work while leaving it honestly recorded as unresolved.
- Use Create Job (the leaves/shears icon on the record header).
- Edit the title so it's obvious what the job is for — "monitor crack, check if spreading" rather than just the asset name.
- In the Job Details panel:
- Set a Due Date for the first check.
- Add a Recurrence if you want it to repeat — quarterly suits most slow-moving problems.
- Choose the Assignees who'll do the checking.
- Click Create Job.
That's it. The check now arrives on its own, and because the job is linked to the defect, everything stays together on the asset's Tasks tab.
Both a one-off and a recurring job are worth having, and they answer different questions. A single job dated a few months out suits "go and look, then decide" — you expect to make a call either way at that point. A recurring job suits something you'll be living with for a while, and it's the one that builds up the picture of whether the problem is actually deteriorating.
Leave the defect open
It's tempting to close the defect and let the monitoring job carry it. Don't. Closed means resolved, and a known problem recorded as resolved is a gap in your records — exactly the sort of gap that matters if the asset is ever the subject of a complaint, a claim or an insurance question.
Leaving it Open at Low priority costs you nothing (you can filter it out of your working list) and keeps the record straight: the problem exists, you know about it, and here is the evidence you have been keeping an eye on it.
- Take the photo from the same spot each time. A run of photos from the same angle shows movement far better than a set taken from wherever the inspector happened to stand.
- Say what "worse" looks like in the job description — "check whether the crack has reached the drain cover". It gives whoever attends a clear decision to make rather than a judgement call.
- When it does need fixing, raise a separate job for the repair and let the monitoring job stop. See Fixing defects with jobs.
Common Questions
No, and you don't need one. Leaving the defect Open at Low priority marks it as known but not urgent, and the scheduled job is what does the real work — it makes the checking happen rather than just labelling it. If you'd rather signal it more explicitly, Investigating is the closest status.
Set them to Low priority and filter your list by priority when you're working through the urgent items. That keeps them out of your way without recording them as fixed.
Yes. Create a job against the asset directly, with a recurrence, and describe what to look at. You don't need a defect first — though if there's a genuine fault, logging it as a defect gives you the better record.
Set the recurring job to Cancelled (or let the last one complete and don't repeat it), raise a job for the repair itself, and once that's done set the defect to Fixed or Closed. The full history stays on the asset's Tasks tab.
Something not working?
If a recurring job isn't appearing when you expect it, see Scheduling recurring tasks.