A tenant reported a slow leak under a kitchen sink. I told them I'd get someone out, made a mental note, and then a work trip buried that mental note under two weeks of other things. Nobody's fault in any single moment. It just fell out of the one place it existed: my memory.
By the time I followed up, the slow leak had done real damage to the cabinet underneath and the subfloor. What would have been a same-week faucet repair became a much larger, much more expensive job, plus an upset tenant who had every right to be upset. They'd told me. I just hadn't written it down anywhere that would remind me.
That's the whole case for tracking maintenance requests as records instead of texts and mental notes. Not because texts are unreliable exactly, but because a text thread has no concept of "this is still open" or "this is now two weeks overdue." A list does.
Since then, every request gets logged the moment it comes in, with a status, and the open ones stay visible until they're not open anymore. It's a small amount of extra effort at the moment a tenant tells you something, in exchange for never again finding out about a problem after it's gotten expensive.
The repair cost me a few hundred dollars more than it should have. The lesson was worth more than that.