Sites, buildings & locations
The physical hierarchy - how to structure sites, buildings, and locations so placement, roll-ups, and reporting stay clean.
The location hierarchy answers where. It has three levels - Site → Building → Location - and every level can hold assets directly.
Sites
A site is a property or campus: the civic complex, the water treatment plant, the works yard. Sites carry an address and geolocation (which places their assets on the map), a square footage with cost-per-square-foot fields for occupancy cost analytics, and are the top level for cost and FCI roll-ups.
Different organizations legitimately set this level up differently - match it to how your portfolio is managed, budgeted, and reported:
| Setup | Shape | Typical of |
|---|---|---|
| Single site | One site; buildings are the top working level | A hospital campus, one plant, a single large facility |
| Multi-site | One site per property; roll-ups compare sites | School boards (site per school), municipalities, property portfolios |
| Mixed | A main campus site plus satellite sites | A town with a civic campus and outlying facilities |
The rule of thumb: create a separate site when a property is managed, budgeted, or reported separately. And note the division of labour with classifications: sites answer where, never whose - a department-organized team encodes departments in the classification hierarchy, not by bending the location tree.
Buildings
Buildings belong to a site. Beyond the name, two fields earn their keep:
- Building type - arena, office, warehouse… enables type-based benchmarking.
- Area (sq ft) - useful reference data alongside floors and year built. Note that FCI is computed from replacement values, not floor area - cost-per-square-foot analytics run at the site level, from the site's square footage.
Buildings are also the anchor for floorplans.
Locations
Locations are the rooms, floors, and zones inside a building - Mechanical Room 201, Roof, Kitchen. Each has a location type (editable catalog) and can carry its own QR code, so a scan at the door shows everything in the room.
Placing assets at the right level
| Asset | Sensible placement |
|---|---|
| Pump in a mech room | Site + building + location |
| Rooftop unit | Site + building (location "Roof" if you have one) |
| Parking lot lighting | Site only |
| Grounds equipment | Site only |
Deeper placement means faster technician routing but more upkeep. Precision where work happens, coarseness elsewhere.
What rolls up the hierarchy
- Costs - every cost lands on an asset and rolls up through location, building, and site.
- Condition & FCI - FCI computes per building, per site, and portfolio-wide.
- Work volume - dashboards slice open/completed work orders by site and building.
- Documents - attach at any level; a building's as-builts live on the building, not on forty assets.
Non-asset work
Work orders and requests can target a location instead of an asset - "paint room 114", "ice on north entrance steps". This keeps facility work in the same queue without inventing fake assets. See Work orders.
Renaming and restructuring
Names are display-only - renaming a site or building is safe and instant everywhere. Moving a building between sites or merging locations is heavier since history follows the record; do it deliberately, and re-check any reports you export regularly afterward.