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 on the board — what your crew calls a job when they are talking about it in the office.

A customer never reads those words. On their status emails and on the portal, the same five statuses read as Received, Booked in, In progress, Completed, and Closed. That is deliberate, not a translation that happened to drift: "Assigned" is a board column, but "Booked in" is how you would actually say it to someone on the phone, and it claims ownership of the job without claiming a time — because a time is not a promise this system can make. The two vocabularies are allowed to disagree, because they are answering different questions: yours is "where is this on my board", theirs is "did you get my request".

How a job arrives

Every job starts life as new, whichever of the four ways it got onto the board — an email to a mailbox you connected, an email to your own WorkOrders address, your own team typing it in, or a customer raising it directly. See how work gets into WorkOrders for all four. From here, everything that happens to the job is a step through the same state machine, whichever door it came in.

A job belongs to a customer, and it also records where the work is. The address as it was written stays on the job word for word, and alongside it the job is linked to a site — the building itself, matched or created from that address so the same place stops being retyped every week. Which customer, which firm and which site are organisations, customers and sites.

Assigning

Any unclaimed job is up for grabs by anyone in the company — there is no queue to join and no permission to ask for. 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. That figure — hours attending — is not internal: the customer's assignment email names the technician and says they have indicated they will attend within that many hours. It is not on the portal, and it is not a commitment the system polices, but it is a number your customer reads. It is worth being realistic with it.

When somebody hands a job to a technician rather than the technician taking it themselves, that technician gets an email saying so, and their phone buzzes. Claim a job yourself and neither happens — you already know, so there is nothing to tell you.

Out on the road, claiming is the technician's own move rather than the office's — a new job lands on every phone at once and the first to tap owns it. See taking a job.

In progress

Marking a job ongoing records that work has started without saying it is finished, and a long job can go ongoing more than once — each pass can carry its own note. Only the technician the job is assigned to can do this, or an administrator standing in for them.

Completing

Completing a job asks for a completion note — what was done — and that note is what the customer's completion email carries. A technician completing from their phone is also asked how long they were on site, which is internal and never leaves your firm; see updating a job from the van for that screen, and how long the job took for what the figure is worth afterwards.

The health and safety note is a separate thing entirely

Alongside the completion note there is a second, optional field: a health and safety note. It exists for exactly what it sounds like — a hazard on site, the state a property was left in, something the next person attending needs to know. It goes to your company's own health and safety address, and it is never sent to the customer, under any circumstance. Keep the two notes separate in your head the way the product keeps them separate in the database: one is a message to your customer, the other is a message to your own team.

It goes further than an email. A completed job sits on an awaiting sign-off worklist until an administrator has read the note and said so, which is recorded against the job and can be taken back. That whole story — what to write, where it lands, and who signs it off — is health and safety from the van.

Every step is written down, and nobody can rewrite it

Assigning, starting work, completing, deleting, reopening — each one writes a row to a job's timeline the moment it happens, and that timeline is append-only. Nobody edits a past entry, including an administrator; the record is what was actually said and done, not what somebody wishes had been said. If a note was wrong, the fix is a later entry correcting it, not an edit to the one that was wrong.

Deleting and reopening

Deleting a job is an administrator's action, and it always asks for a reason first — there is no delete without one. It is a soft delete: the job is not destroyed, only marked deleted and taken off the working board, so a duplicate or a mistaken entry can be looked at again later rather than being gone for good. Nothing is emailed to the customer when a job is deleted.

A deleted or completed job can be reopened by an administrator, which hands it back to whoever had it — or to whoever reopened it, if nobody did — and puts it back to work rather than back to square one. Reopening is silent: the customer already had their completion email, and putting a job back on the board is not news they need.

Attachments

Photos, video and PDFs can be attached to a job from the job page by anyone on your team, and by customers through their own portal link once they have one. However a file arrives — in an email, from a technician's phone, from a customer — it is stored once. If the same file turns up twice, WorkOrders recognises it and does not keep a second copy. For adding one from a phone while standing in front of the problem, see photos and files from site.

Urgency

A job can carry an urgency of low, normal, high, or emergency. It is set automatically from the incoming message where one exists, or by hand for anything typed in directly. Like hours attending, it is entirely internal — urgency is never part of what a customer sees, whether that is a status email or the portal.

The board

The board is a filterable, paginated list — status, assignee, customer, a date range, free text, and a mine toggle that narrows it to your own jobs. It updates itself while you watch, checking every ten seconds for jobs that have arrived since you loaded the page — that is a fair way to describe it, but it is a check on a timer, not a live feed: the board tells you new work has arrived and lets you decide when to bring it in, rather than rearranging the rows under you mid-click.

Reports

Reports is where a month is read back, rather than a day worked through: a strip of figures for a period, over a grid of saved reports that each say in plain words what they filter, how many jobs match right now, and are one click from a spreadsheet. Five come with the account and you can build your own. The whole section is restricted to administrators and owners — a report carries every customer's contact details alongside the work, so it is not offered more widely than that. See reports and saved views.

Beside it is the workload calendar: a week at a time, a row per technician and the seven days across the top, so you can see at a glance who had a full Tuesday and who had none. A job sits on the day it was accepted, and a completed job sits on the day it was finished as well — work that ran over several days shows on both ends of it. There is a row for unassigned work too, which is usually the row worth looking at first. See the workload week.

The job reference

Every work order gets a short reference like WO-4F2K9X the moment it is created. You will see it on the board, on the job page, in the subject line of every status email sent about it, and in the reports export — it is the one identifier that follows a job everywhere, and the fastest way to find one again when a customer reads it back to you over the phone.