← Read previous Toolbox editions: August 2026
A Note From Pat
Hitting the Road This Fall
We are a few days away from the official start of fall, but the fall trade show season has already begun. Our team has hit the road and we will be all over the country. I hope a few of you were able to connect with our awesome support team at ASPMA and get some hands-on training and support this week.
Here are a few of the places where you will find the heroes over the next couple of weeks:
- ERAPPAProvidence, RI
- NCPSMAAtlantic Beach, NC
- KSPMALexington, KY
- FSPMAOrlando, FL
- MASMSSt. Cloud, MN
- MSBO Facilities ConferenceCrystal Mountain, MI
- AK SBAAnchorage, AK
- WAMOAYakima, WA
- VSPMABlacksburg, VA
I will personally be at MASMS and MSBO, so please stop by and say hello if you are attending either of those events.
We also have a webinar coming up with Steffen Wiest from Neosho School District. Steffen has done a great job of integrating his work order history and his backlog into his planning and giving his technicians a voice in the planning process. Check out the details below.
As always, if you need me I’m only an email or call away. Please let us know how we can best support you.
~ Pat
Live Webinar · September 23
15 Spreadsheets In. One Capital Plan Out.
One spreadsheet for HVAC. One for doors. One for athletics, one for safety, one for lighting. You know the drill, and you probably know which one only opens on one person’s laptop.
Steffen Wiest, Executive Director of Operations at Neosho School District, ran capital planning that way across 15 spreadsheets. Then he pulled all of it into PlanningHQ: one plan, one system of record, and a format his business office trusts.
On Wednesday, September 23, he is opening his real account and showing you exactly how it works.
| When | Wednesday, September 23, 2026 | 2:00 PM ET (about an hour) |
| Who it’s for | Facilities Directors, Operations Managers, Capital Planning teams, Business Officers, and Finance leaders |
| Speakers | Steffen Wiest, Neosho School District, and Michael Glines, OperationsHERO |
| Can’t make it live? | Register anyway and we will send you the recording. |
What you’ll walk away with
- How one deferred work order quietly becomes a line in your capital backlog
- How to get every spreadsheet and asset list into one shared plan (AI does the heavy lifting on import)
- How to compare bond, grant, and operating fund scenarios side by side
- How repair history turns into a repair-or-replace call you can defend
- A capital calculator you can run with your own student count and construction costs
Already a PlanningHQ user? Come see how a peer set his up. Not yet? This is the closest thing to trying it on for size.
Product Corner
What Shipped This Month
Our team ships every couple of weeks, so your platform keeps getting better without you lifting a finger. Three releases landed since the last Toolbox. Here is the high-level view, product by product.
HeroHQ
- Email a request, get a work order. Email-to-work-order is now standard on every HeroHQ account. Product admins will find a new Email Routing page in settings to set up inbound addresses.
- Asset imports that update, not just add. A guided import wizard matches your spreadsheet to existing assets, shows you every change before it writes anything, and a new “Assets for Import” export gives you a correctly mapped file to start from. The asset list also gains a compact table view and bulk deactivate.
- Reviewers can set cost centers. Workflow reviewers can now set debit and credit cost center overrides on a request, and admins can change overrides in bulk from the request list.
- Timesheets that add up. Assigned requests appear on the weekly grid before any hours are logged, labor saves on the day you clicked, and week totals stay inside the week.
EventHQ
- The Rate Sheet is now a pricing matrix. Billing groups down the rows, rate groups across the columns, so you can see what every class of renter pays at a glance. One rate can hold weekday and weekend pricing, and a price change tells you how many uninvoiced charges it would touch before you confirm.
- Quotes match invoices. The estimated total a requester sees on the event form now uses the same math as the invoice.
- Sent invoices stay editable where it matters. Customer notes, title, and due date can be updated after sending, right up until an invoice is voided.
- Arbiter integration, rebuilt. Several venues can share one Arbiter school, synced games arrive with services already attached, and a new sync activity log shows exactly what every sync did. The new mapping engine is rolling out account by account; the mapping screens are visible now so you can prepare.
- Billing accuracy pass. A sweep across pricing, invoicing, and billing runs so the number on the screen, the invoice, and the ledger all agree.
InspectionHQ
- Every violation in one place. Admins get a new Violations page listing every open and resolved violation across every inspection, with filters and click-through to the source item and its linked work order.
- Templates travel. Export an inspection template from one account and import it into another, including scoring, comment presets, and asset field mappings.
- Inspect the rooms, not the building. Schedules can now skip the parent location and inspect only its child locations.
- Claim-as-you-go for solo inspectors. “Allow unassigned locations” now works with a single inspector, so nothing is pre-assigned and they claim each location as they start it.
- Inspector-created rooms stay put. Rooms added mid-inspection stay in InspectionHQ instead of showing up in everyone else’s location pickers (per-schedule setting).
InventoryHQ
- See the charge from the request. The issuance table now shows its cost center entries and offers a Non-billable toggle.
- Move slips show real numbers. Delivery and pick slips for a move between storage locations now print the quantity and cost that actually moved, plus the destination location.
- Clone without phantom stock. Cloning an item now opens a draft you review before saving, so copies no longer inherit stock they never received.
- Returns credit exactly what was charged. The adjustment export now shows the actual charged unit cost plus Shipping and Tax columns.
PlanningHQ
- Slice your plan by building system. Anywhere you could group or filter by category, you can now use Uniformat too: the Capital Needs Backlog, Plan Needs, Rank & Organize, the Capital Timeline, the Replacement Forecast, and more. CIP exports gain eight new views.
- Needs inherit from their asset. Create a need from an asset and it picks up the asset’s location, category, and classification.
- Replacement Forecast filter fix. Selecting a building system now applies immediately.
AutomationHQ
- Stuck occurrences, unstuck. EventHQ admins can find occurrences that never reached the building automation partner and re-send them in bulk, with a preview of exactly what goes out.
- Clean up sync history. Clear history by occurrence or date window so the entries that matter are easy to find. Clearing history never changes what the partner receives.
- Bigger resets. A reset can now cover up to 50,000 occurrences in one pass, up from 1,000. Remove from BAS and Restore to BAS are now available to every Building Automation subscriber.
Across the Platform
- One heads up on exports. Large spreadsheet exports were dropping one record at each batch boundary. That is fixed. If you downloaded a large export before August 22, 2026, and are using it for reconciliation, pull a fresh copy.
- Dates read the same everywhere and follow your browser’s locale, so 08-12-26 is no longer a guessing game.
- Cost center corrections on charges split across several centers now reconcile every center, not just one.
Plus dozens of fixes across every product, including safety-note acknowledgments on task books, scheduled requests that edit cleanly, and calendar views for venue viewers.
Want the Full Detail?
Release Notes Live Inside Your App
Every release is documented right where you work. Here is where to find the Release Notes and what each section covers.
Hallway HEROES
Nominations Are Open. Who’s Yours?
Last month we introduced Hallway HEROES, our awards program for the custodians, technicians, and team members who make a difference every day and rarely get recognized for it. Nominations are coming in, and we would love to see the person from your campus on the list.
You already know who it is. The one who unlocks the building at 5:30 a.m., fixes the thing nobody else can fix, and has never once asked for credit.
| Who you can nominate | Custodians, maintenance technicians, grounds crew, HVAC and trades specialists, and operations team members |
| Who can nominate | Facilities and operations leaders at K-12 schools, colleges, universities, and local government |
| What it takes | Their name, a photo, and the story of why they matter. About five minutes. |
| What they get | A weekly spotlight on LinkedIn, Facebook, and right here in The Toolbox |
| Grand prize | A scholarship awarded in the winner’s name to a student at their school |
| Deadline | Fall nominations close November 23, 2026 |
Five minutes. One story. A whole community that finally gets to see what you see every day.
Client Spotlight
Hear From Anne Birky at Bend-La Pine School District
Anne Birky of Bend-La Pine School District in Bend, Oregon, sat down with us to talk about what changed for her team once work orders, requests, and communication lived in one place. It is a few minutes well spent, especially if you are trying to explain to someone else on your campus what “one system” actually feels like day to day.
Anne Birky · Bend-La Pine School DistrictWe are always looking for clients to share their stories. If you’d like to participate, or you know someone with a good one, reach out to Sarah at sarah@operationshero.com.
From the Blog
From D+ to Documented: Turning What You Know into a Funded Plan
America’s public schools earned a D+ on the 2025 ASCE Infrastructure Report Card, the same grade as 2021. The average school building is 49 years old against a 50-year design life, and fewer than half of states collect representative facility data.
Here is the part that should feel familiar: you already know which roof is on borrowed time and which boiler gets babied through every winter. That knowledge lives in spreadsheets, work orders, and the heads of your most experienced people. The gap is not knowledge. It is documentation your board can fund.
The post walks through how to turn what your team already knows into a plan that holds up in a budget meeting, using PlanningHQ for life-cycle costs and EnergyHQ for the utility data that flags failing equipment before it fails.
Bookmark These
Quick Links
- Product Login
- How to Find Release Notes in Your App
- Save Your Seat: PlanningHQ with Neosho, September 23
- Nominate a Hallway HERO
- Client Spotlight: Bend-La Pine School District
- From D+ to Documented
- HeroHQ Technician Training
- HeroHQ Admin Training
- Getting Started with PlanningHQ
- PlanningHQ Office Hours
- The Toolbox: August 2026 Edition
