CMMS software for small business: features and price

What a small business needs from CMMS software

CMMS software for a small business is a system that keeps the asset list, turns requests into work orders, plans preventive maintenance and reports cost and downtime per asset. A small team needs at least work orders, preventive maintenance schedules with due dates, a spare-parts list and simple reports. Prices are usually set per user or per technician, so count who will log in.

This guide is for owners, plant managers and the one or two people who keep the machines, vehicles or buildings running. It covers the requirements, the questions that separate products, how CMMS prices are built, a worked example in euros, and how Skyline Nexus ERP handles maintenance. For the difference between CMMS, CAFM and IWMS, see our separate guide on that topic.

Signs you have outgrown the spreadsheet

Most small firms start with a whiteboard, a shared spreadsheet or a notebook in the workshop. That works until the same few problems appear every month. If three or more of these are familiar, a CMMS will pay for the time it takes to set up.

• Nobody can say what was done to a machine the last time it failed, or who did it.
• Service intervals live in one person's head and slip when that person is on holiday.
• Spare parts are bought urgently at a premium because no one knew stock was low.
• Requests arrive by phone, e-mail and corridor conversation, and some are never closed.
• You cannot tell the accountant what maintenance cost per asset or per site last year.
• An insurer, auditor or customer asks for inspection records and they take days to collect.

Requirements checklist

Write the checklist before you look at any product, and score every product against the same list. The items below are what a small maintenance function uses every week; anything beyond them is optional.

• Asset register: serial number, manufacturer, model, location, and parent and child components.
• Work orders with type (corrective, preventive), priority, status, assigned person, labour, parts and external cost.
• A request channel so staff can report a fault without phoning the technician.
• Preventive maintenance schedules by calendar interval and, for machines that run in hours, by meter reading.
• Checklists with sign-off and measured values, for inspections that must be repeatable.
• A spare-parts list with minimum and maximum stock levels.
• Reports on downtime, repair time, cost per asset and the share of planned work completed.
• Export of all data, so you are never locked in.

How to choose: questions that separate products

Feature lists look alike, so test the parts that differ in practice. Ask each vendor these questions and ask to see the answer on screen, in a trial with your own assets.

First, what happens automatically and what is manual? Some systems raise preventive work orders by themselves on the due date; others show the due date and a person raises the work order. Both work, but you must know which you are buying. Second, how do technicians work on the floor: a native app, a mobile web page, or paper that someone types in later? Third, how are the reports calculated? Mean time to repair, mean time between failures and planned-maintenance compliance have more than one definition; the EN 15341 standard lists maintenance KPIs, and a vendor's formula may differ from it. Ask for the formula.

Fourth, does the CMMS connect to purchasing, stock and accounting, or will maintenance cost be retyped into another system? Fifth, which languages and which hosting region does the vendor offer, and can you export every record if you leave?

What CMMS software costs: pricing models and hidden costs

CMMS prices are built in a few common ways: a fee per user or per technician each month, sometimes with free seats for people who only submit requests; a fee per asset or per site; or tiers where preventive maintenance, inventory or reports unlock only in a higher plan. Annual billing is usually cheaper than monthly billing.

Skyline Nexus ERP includes CMMS and the asset register in every current plan, next to accounting, inventory and purchasing. Solo, for one user and one branch, costs EUR 17 a month plus VAT in Ireland (prices are set per country, for example GBP 15 in the UK). Every plan starts with a free first month. Under the launch offer, valid until 31 January 2027, Solo costs EUR 8.50 a month for the first 3 months, then EUR 17 a month; on annual billing, EUR 170 covers 15 months instead of 12. Prices were checked on 3 October 2026; confirm them on the pricing page.

• Per-user fees once technicians, supervisors and requesters all need logins.
• Asset caps that force an upgrade when you register the whole site.
• Paid modules for spare parts, purchasing or a mobile app.
• Implementation, data import and training days.
• The price after any introductory discount ends, and VAT on top of the list price.

Worked example: what one breakdown costs

A small food-packaging company has 35 assets, one maintenance lead and two technicians. A conveyor motor fails on Tuesday. The work order records parts EUR 240, an external electrician EUR 180 and 3 hours of internal labour at EUR 40, a total of EUR 540. The line stood still for 3 hours, and each hour of output is worth EUR 500 in contribution, so the stoppage cost another EUR 1,500. The real cost of the failure is EUR 2,040.

Over the quarter the same line has 4 corrective work orders with repair times of 2, 3, 5 and 2 hours: 12 hours in total, so the mean time to repair is 3 hours. Measured as days in the period divided by completed corrective work orders, mean time between failures is 90 / 4 = 22.5 days. Of 24 preventive work orders raised from schedules, 22 were completed, a completion rate of 91.7%.

Software cost on Skyline Nexus ERP Solo for the first 12 paid months after the free month: 12 x EUR 17 = EUR 204 ex VAT at the regular price, or 3 x EUR 8.50 + 9 x EUR 17 = EUR 178.50 with the launch offer. If better planning prevents a single breakdown like Tuesday's in a year, the EUR 2,040 saved is about ten times the yearly subscription. That is arithmetic, not a promise: the saving depends on your maintenance discipline.

When free CMMS software is enough

Free CMMS plans and spreadsheets are a reasonable choice for a very small asset base looked after by one person, where nobody else needs to submit requests or see reports. If you have fewer than about twenty assets, no regulated inspections and no need to cost maintenance per asset, a well-kept spreadsheet with a column for the next due date may be all you need.

Free tiers typically limit users, assets, work orders or features such as preventive schedules and reports, and the data may be hard to export later. Read the limits before you load your asset list, and compare any paid plan by the total for 12 months at the price you will pay after the first year.

A 30-day rollout plan for a small team

A free month is enough to prove or reject a CMMS if you treat it as a pilot with a short, fixed scope. This plan suits a site with up to about fifty assets.

• Week 1: import the asset list from your spreadsheet, with location, serial number and criticality.
• Week 1: set up spare parts for the ten most critical assets, with minimum stock levels.
• Week 2: create preventive schedules and checklists for those critical assets, starting with what the manufacturer or your insurer requires.
• Week 2: route all new faults through work orders, even small ones, so the history starts clean.
• Week 3: close every work order with labour, parts, downtime and a root cause.
• Week 4: run the downtime, cost and planned-work reports and decide whether to continue.

CMMS in Skyline Nexus ERP

Skyline Nexus ERP has a CMMS menu with work orders (corrective, preventive, calibration, installation, acceptance), requests that a reviewer approves into work orders, preventive maintenance schedules by calendar, meter or both, a planner view, task lists with sign-off, photo and measured values with limits, permits to work, compliance records with expiry dates, service contracts, warranty claims and an asset criticality matrix. Work orders record downtime hours, labour, parts and external cost, technician sign-off and root cause. The asset register holds serial numbers, barcodes, QR codes and parent and child components, and runs depreciation.

Reports cover work orders, maintenance and department costs, downtime, engineer performance, spare-parts usage and planned-maintenance compliance, with mean time to repair and mean time between failures. Assets and schedules can be imported, CMMS records have their own audit trail and recycle bin, and work orders are filtered by branch for multi-site teams. CMMS screens are available in English, Arabic, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

What it does not do today: preventive work orders are raised from each schedule's next-due date by a person, not generated overnight, and expiry alerts are not sent automatically; there is no native mobile app (technicians use a mobile-optimised web screen); spare parts are a CMMS register, not stock movements in inventory; maintenance cost is reported per asset, department and cost centre but does not post to the general ledger by itself; and there is no IoT sensor monitoring. Solo covers one user; when technicians need their own logins, choose a larger plan. Start the free month and run the 30-day plan above on your own assets.