The work already happens.
Piano technicians maintain complex fleets across practice rooms, studios, halls, and performance spaces. They tune, regulate, repair, rebuild, and manage humidity. They know what the inventory needs. What usually goes missing is the one thing that closes budgets and wins contract renewals: the record that proves it. CAUTtools is the operating layer between what your technician does every day and what your administrator, dean, or next client needs to understand.
Workload formula · live
Set the average profile of your inventory. The multipliers are the published CAUT ratings, unaltered.
Base × C × RP × CC × A × U × U/G × SM = RW. Instruments ÷ RW = technicians. Ratings are assigned per instrument and averaged across the inventory; CAUTtools does that averaging from the register, so the number moves when the fleet does.
You maintain pianos. You know the workload.
But when you need a budget, a contract renewal, or proof of what you delivered, you’re translating that knowledge into a spreadsheet someone else designed for something else.
You own pianos. You expect they’ll be maintained.
But what that actually costs, what condition the fleet is in, and whether staffing is adequate usually lives in a technician’s head, a spreadsheet, or fragments of email.
“Despite large inventories of high quality pianos and the employment or contracting of highly-skilled technicians, many music institutions have inadequate piano maintenance programs to meet their musical needs.”
Guidelines for Effective Institutional Piano Maintenance · Conclusion, p. 13
Not for lack of technicians. For lack of a record.
The work already happens. What is usually missing is the thing an administrator can read: how many instruments there are, what condition they are in, when each was last serviced, what the humidity has done to them, and what any of it costs.
That gap is why budget requests get declined and why staffing ratios drift. The Guidelines answer it with a formula and a set of standards. CAUTtools keeps the data those standards need, in the course of ordinary daily work — a QR scan at the piano, a ticket closed, a tuning logged.
- Every instrument carries a scannable tag and its own history.
- Every factor in the workload formula is a field on the record, not an estimate.
- Every report is exportable and printable for a committee packet.
Six clauses of the manual, made operational.
Each capability below exists to satisfy a specific recommendation in the Guidelines. The clause it answers is stamped above it.
The register
One record per instrument: make, model, serial, size, year, building, room, class, and the seven CAUT factor codes. Photographs attach to the record. Bulk editing, room merges, and duplicate resolution keep a decades-old list from calcifying.
Workload and staffing
The formula in the hero, run against your real register rather than a guess. The All Pianos with Workload report shows the per-factor averages, the recommended workload, and the FTE figure, with the arithmetic shown.
Scheduling and tuning history
The baseline is four tunings a year per instrument, more for heavy or critical use. CAUTtools tracks what was actually done and surfaces what was not: the Unserviced Pianos report is the one nobody wants to run and everybody needs.
Service requests and tickets
The manual recommends a report system so anyone with access to a piano can flag a deficiency. A QR tag on the instrument opens a request form pre-filled with that piano's identity. Requests become tickets that get claimed, assigned, commented on, and closed.
Climate and deterioration
Relative humidity variance is the largest single factor in tuning stability and long-term structural integrity. CAUTtools models deterioration against the climate code, projects lifespan and maintenance cost over twenty years, and tracks humidifier refills as recurring work.
Deterioration and cost curves: CAUTtools methodologyValuation and long-term planning
An adequate maintenance budget runs five to ten percent of the inventory's replacement cost. That calculation needs a current valuation, so CAUTtools keeps one — and turns it into replacement schedules on the twenty-year horizon the Guidelines ask a plan to project.
Replacement sequencing: CAUTtools methodologyHosted, per institution.
Each institution gets its own subdomain and its own database. Nothing is pooled across schools: your register, your requesters, your tickets, your valuation. Technicians reach it from a phone in a practice room; administrators reach the same records from a desk.
- Runs in a browser. No install, no client software, no lab machine.
- Public intake is public. Requesters never need an account, only the QR tag.
- Calendar aware. Room and hall schedules import from institutional calendars, so tuning is not booked against a rehearsal.
- Your data leaves with you. Exports for inventory, tickets, and reports in standard formats.
Contact us for pricing.
An annual subscription, quoted per institution. What it costs depends on the size of the register and whether you need your existing records migrated — so we quote it after we have seen the inventory, not before.
Every subscription includes
- The whole platform. There is no tier that withholds the reports or the workload formula.
- Unlimited technician, administrator, and requester accounts.
- Your own subdomain and your own database.
- QR tag generation and printing for the full register.
- Migration of your existing inventory, whatever shape it is in.
- Updates, backups, and support.
Ask about consortium and multi-campus arrangements if you are buying for more than one school.
Bring your inventory. We will show you the number.
A walkthrough runs about forty minutes. Send a list of your instruments in whatever shape it is currently in — a spreadsheet, a database export, a scan of a card file — and we will load it and run the workload formula against it live.
He understands the problem because he lives it.
CAUTtools is designed and developed by Willis Glen “Chip” Miller III, D.M.A., a piano technician, pianist, educator, and systems designer who has worked at conservatories and universities maintaining large institutional piano programs.
CAUTtools is the answer he built because it didn’t exist.