How do you handle repair and facilities requests in chat?
An employee sends a request with a photo and location to the Facilities bot, the facilities manager claims it with a button, the bot shows the room's repair history and tells the employee when it's done.
Bot
/start
Hi! 👋 Something broken, leaking, missing or needs cleaning? Click the button and fill out the form. Location and a photo are required, so the technician knows where to go and what to bring.
Megan messages the Facilities bot. Click "New request," check the form and submit it. The location and photo are already there.
Why handle repair and facilities requests in your team chat
Usually “something’s leaking” goes to the facilities lead’s DMs with no photo or room number, the technician has to go and check, purchases live in someone’s head, and a month later nobody remembers that the radiator in 312 has already been fixed twice.
- A request with a photo and an exact location. The Facilities bot’s form won’t go through without the office, floor, room and a photo. The technician heads straight to the right radiator instead of replying “where exactly is it leaking?” to a “something’s leaking” DM.
- You can see who’s on it and what’s ordered. A Claim button and a name under the card, and for purchases an Ordered status with a delivery date. Two technicians never go out on the same call, and nobody asks when the paper is arriving.
- Recurring problems stand out. The bot counts requests per location and says so right on the card: “this is the third request for room 312 this month.” The room’s history sits in the thread, so a chronic problem stops looking like just another call.
- Employees hear back on their own. When the facilities lead clicks Done, the bot messages the employee directly with what was done and asks them to rate the job. Nobody has to remember who to reply to.
- The office manager sees the big picture. Open the Facilities requests chat and you can see what’s in progress, what’s urgent, what’s ordered and when it arrives. No spreadsheets, status meetings or DMs.
- Grows with you. Today it’s a form and three buttons. Tomorrow the handler schedules routine checks, sends requests to contractors, tracks spending per office, and an AI agent answers routine “where do I get paper” questions right in direct messages.
How to set it up
30 minutes in Pachca plus a handler: n8n with no code, or a couple of hours of a developer's time. You'll need administrator rights in Pachca.
In Pachca
- 1
Create a Facilities requests chat and a Facilities tag
+ next to search Chat. Add the facilities lead, technicians and office manager. Then go to Members table view the tag icon: create a "Facilities" tag and add it to the chat. An @Facilities mention in an urgent request reaches the whole team, even if they've muted the chat. - 2
Create the Facilities bot
Automations Integrations Webhook +. Make it a bot for multiple chats and turn on the Public toggle, so employees can find the bot in search and message it directly. Copy the token from the API tab: your handler will need it. - 3
Add the bot to the chat
Chat settings Add members the Integrations tab Facilities. Only an administrator or the chat's creator can do this. - 4
Turn on the outgoing webhook
Bot settings the Outgoing webhook tab. Paste your handler's address from option B or C below into the Webhook URL field, then select the New messages event with the /start command and Button clicks. Send the bot /start: it should reply with a New request button.
Request handler
The form with a photo, the card with buttons and the room history come from a handler that receives the bot's events. Pick one of three options, depending on your setup.
- A
No handler yet: requests posted to the chat from a template
Make the Facilities requests chat open to everyone and pin a template:
Employees post there themselves. The technician reacts with 👀 when they take a request and ✅ when it's done. Repeat issues are found by searching for the room number. You don't get the buttons or room history, but setup takes five minutes.🧰 What happened: Broken / Leaking / Need to buy / Cleaning Where: office, floor, room Details: what exactly and since when Photo: attach to the message Urgent: yes / no - B
No code with n8n
Grab the ready-made time-off bot workflow. It already has /start, a button, a form, a card in the chat and a reply to the employee. Swap the form fields for "What happened," "Where," "Details," "Photo" and "Urgent," and the buttons for Claim, Order a part and Done. Build the room history from a requests table (Google Sheets or Postgres) filtered by the Where field, and run scheduled checks and delivery reminders on a Schedule Trigger. Paste the Production URL of the Webhook node into step 4. To install n8n and the Pachca node, see the n8n article in our Help Center. - C
Your own code, or requests go to a contractor
Give this skill to Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor. It covers the bot and tag setup, a form with a required location and photo, attaching the photo to the card, room history, the Claim, Order a part and Done buttons, an Ordered status with a date, scheduled checks, a rating in direct messages, a monthly summary per office, sending requests to a contractor by email or through their API, and where to host the handler. The skill is in Russian.
With your team
- 5
Agree on response times and statuses
Urgent requests get claimed within 15 minutes, everything else by the end of the day. Anything that needs buying gets an Ordered status with a delivery date, otherwise employees ask "where's the paper" in DMs. Whoever claimed the request clicks Done, and the bot messages the employee on its own.
Pachca doesn't track requests or purchases: the status lives on the card, and the history in the thread and the handler's table. The same bot can take IT requests too. That twin scenario is covered in IT requests. Our Help Center explains how forms, bot buttons and outgoing webhooks work.
Troubleshooting
- The bot doesn't reply to /start: New messages isn't selected in the outgoing webhook, or the handler is off. n8n needs the Production URL, not the Test URL.
- The photo from the form doesn't show up on the card: the handler passed only the file name. Upload the file through the files API and pass it in the message's files field.
- The @Facilities mention doesn't notify anyone: the tag isn't added to the chat, or it's written in a different case. Pachca treats "Facilities" and "facilities" as different tags.