A work order, start to finish

Two words for every status

A work order moves through five statuses: new, assigned, ongoing, completed and deleted. Those are the words your team sees on the board.

Customers see different words. In their status emails and on the portal, the same five statuses are Received, Booked in, In progress, Completed and Closed. For example, "Booked in" is how you'd describe an assigned job to a customer on the phone. It tells them someone has the job without promising a time.

How a job arrives

Every job starts as new, whichever of the four ways it arrived: an email to a mailbox you've connected, an email to your own WorkOrders address, your team typing it in, or a customer raising it themselves. See how work gets into WorkOrders for all four. After that, every job goes through the same steps, however it arrived.

A job belongs to a customer, and it also records where the work is. The address is kept on the job exactly as it was written. The job is also linked to a site, which is the building itself. WorkOrders matches the address to an existing site or creates a new one, so you don't have to retype the same place every week. For more on customers, firms and sites, see organisations, customers and sites.

Assigning

Anyone in the company can take an unclaimed job. They don't need to ask permission. Assigning moves a job from new to assigned, gives it a technician, and records how many hours it will be before that technician is on site.

The customer sees that figure, called hours attending. Their assignment email names the technician and says they expect to be there within that many hours. It isn't shown on the portal, and WorkOrders doesn't check whether it was met, but your customer does read it, so be realistic.

When someone gives a job to a technician, that technician gets an email and a notification on their phone. If you take a job yourself, you don't get either, because you already know.

Out on the road, technicians usually take jobs themselves. A new job shows up on every phone at once, and whoever taps it first gets it. See taking a job.

In progress

Marking a job ongoing records that work has started but isn't finished. A long job can be marked ongoing more than once, with a new note each time. Only the technician the job is assigned to can do this, or an administrator on their behalf.

Completing

Completing a job asks for a completion note saying what was done. That note goes in the customer's completion email. A technician completing a job on their phone may also be asked how long they were on site. That figure is internal and the customer never sees it. See updating a job from the van for that screen, and how long the job took for how to use the figure afterwards.

The health and safety note is a separate thing entirely

Next to the completion note there's a second, optional field: the health and safety note. It's for hazards on site, the state a property was left in, or anything the next person there needs to know. It's sent to your company's own health and safety address, and never to the customer. The completion note is a message to your customer, and the health and safety note is a message to your own team.

A completed job also goes on the awaiting sign-off list until an administrator has read the note and signed it off. The sign-off is recorded on the job, and it can be undone. For what to write, where it goes and who signs it off, see health and safety from the van.

Every step is written down, and nobody can rewrite it

Assigning, starting work, completing, deleting and reopening each add an entry to the job's timeline as they happen. Nobody can edit or remove a past entry, administrators included. If a note was wrong, add a new note correcting it.

Deleting and reopening

Only administrators can delete a job, and they always have to give a reason. Deleting doesn't destroy the job. It's marked as deleted and taken off the board, so you can still look at a duplicate or a mistake later. The customer isn't emailed when a job is deleted.

An administrator can reopen a deleted or completed job. It goes back to whoever had it (or to the person reopening it, if nobody had it), and picks up where it left off rather than starting again as new. The customer isn't emailed when a job is reopened.

Attachments

Anyone on your team can attach photos, videos and PDFs to a job from the job page. Customers can add them through their own portal link once they have one. However a file arrives (in an email, from a technician's phone or from a customer), it's stored once. If the same file turns up twice, WorkOrders spots it and doesn't keep a second copy. To add one from your phone on site, see photos and files from site.

Urgency

A job can have an urgency of low, normal, high or emergency. It's set automatically from the incoming message where there is one, or by hand for a job typed in directly. Like hours attending, it's internal. Customers never see it in a status email or on the portal.

The board

The board is a list of jobs, a page at a time. You can filter it by status, urgency, assignee, customer, date range or any text, and the Mine tile narrows it to your own jobs. While the page is open, it checks for new jobs every 30 seconds. When some have arrived, it tells you and you choose when to load them, so the list doesn't change while you're clicking on it.

Reports

Reports is for looking back over a month rather than working through a day. It shows a row of figures for a period, and below that your saved reports. Each one says in plain words what it filters and how many jobs match right now, and you can download it as a spreadsheet in one click. Five come with the account, and you can make your own. Only administrators and owners can see Reports, because a report includes every customer's contact details. See reports and saved views.

Reports also has the workload calendar. It shows one week, with a row for each technician and the seven days across the top, so you can see who had a full Tuesday and who had nothing on. A job sits on the day it was accepted, and a completed job also sits on the day it was finished, so a job that ran over several days shows at both ends. There's a row for unassigned work too, which is usually the first one worth checking. See the workload week.

The job reference

Every work order gets a short reference like WO-4F2K9X as soon as it's created. You'll see it on the board, on the job page, in the subject line of every status email about it, and in the reports export. It stays with the job everywhere, and it's the quickest way to find a job when a customer reads the reference out to you over the phone.