Rutba Facilities on film: a workshop’s assets, its lease and a contractor turned away

A small business owns more than it sells: machines, laptops, keys, a van, software seats. It also rents the building they sit in and depends on outside firms to keep it all working. The film below shows Rutba Assets and Rutba Facilities at Granite and Grain, a furniture workshop in Leeds that we made up, with a showroom at the front.

Play the film

Rutba Facilities: the workshop, its things and the people who fix them (4:23).

Everything it owns

Nineteen things are in one register, from the CNC router to the keys to the front door, and the register says how complete it is. Most sit in the pool, owned by the business; a few are with named people, which is the list of what someone hands back when they leave. The router’s page shows which room it stands in and its money side straight from the books, where it is a fixed asset written down over seven years. Under it is the history, each event written once and never edited, so a mistake is put right by a new event naming the old one.

Software counts too: three seats of design software, two given out, so there is one spare before anyone buys another. The register never holds a licence key. Every contract that covers an asset, the van’s insurance or the sander’s service plan, is kept with its dates and notice period.

The building

Facilities holds the site: a leased unit with every room as a space and every asset placed in one. The ten-year lease carries a rent review and a break, the dates a small business misses most easily, and both go on the due list. Approved firms keep their insurance and accreditation with expiry dates, and the agreements for the yearly tests on the dust extraction and spray booth record who does the work and how quickly they must respond.

Getting something fixed

Anyone can report a fault. Two showroom lights are out with customers due the next day, so the job needs an electrician, and the first name on the list is a firm whose public liability cover ran out earlier in the month. Facilities checks the contractor’s documents before the order is made, refuses it, and says exactly why. A second firm’s cover is in date, so the job goes to them and joins the workshop’s maintenance work; buildings and machines are planned in one place.

Everything with a date ends on one due list. The lapsed insurance stays at the top until somebody chases it; nothing drops off because its date has passed.