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 a postal address, a square footage with cost-per-square-foot fields for occupancy cost analytics, and are the top level for cost and FCI roll-ups. Map positions are set per building rather than per site - a campus with six buildings would otherwise stack six pins on one point.
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.
Map position
A building can carry a latitude and longitude, which is what puts it on a map. Open the building, go to Map position, and either type the two coordinates or click Pick on map to drop a pin and drag it onto the roof.
The two values are set together or not at all - a latitude on its own is not an approximate position, it is a pin in the wrong hemisphere - so the form asks for both and clearing one clears the pair.
The buildings map
The Buildings tab has a list/map switch in its top right. The map plots every building you have placed, using the same map as the rest of AssetLab - so the basemap switcher, your own aerial imagery, and the 3D view all work here too.
Pins are coloured by criticality, falling back to the site's criticality when the building has none of its own. Clicking a pin opens a panel with the building's site, floors, area, year built and coordinates, and a link to edit it. Nearby pins group into a numbered cluster as you zoom out; click a cluster to zoom into it.
The map opens framed on the buildings you have placed. Above it, a line tells you how many buildings have no position yet - those are absent from the map, not missing from your portfolio, and the count is the honest measure of how much placing is left to do.
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.
Exporting
Export at the top of the Locations page downloads the tab you are on - sites, buildings or locations - as a CSV file, limited to the rows the list is showing.
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.