How to write a work order

Search for a work order template and you will get a form with twenty boxes on it. Filling in twenty boxes is not the difficulty. The difficulty is that the same sheet has to do two jobs — tell someone what to go and do, then record what they actually did — and those are written at different times, by different people, for different readers.

Getting that split right is most of what separates a work order somebody can use in eighteen months from a filing cabinet full of paper nobody opens.

The half written before anyone travels

This half is an instruction, and its only job is to get the right person to the right machine with the right expectations. Four things carry almost all of the weight:

• Which machine, unambiguously. Not "the chiller" — the asset code or the serial, and the model. Sites have more than one of everything, and the one you mean is never the one nearest the door.
• Where it is, and how to get at it. The site address gets someone to the car park. What they need is the rest: which roof, whose key, whether it needs a ladder, a permit, or someone to be escorted. This is the single most commonly omitted field and the most expensive one.
• What is actually wrong, in the reporter's words. "Not cooling" is a symptom. "Tripping on high pressure after about twenty minutes, started Tuesday" is a diagnosis half-done. Write down what was said, not your interpretation of it.
• What "done" means. Is this a repair, an inspection, or a look to quote from? An engineer who thinks they are quoting will not bring parts.

The half written on site

This half is a record, and its reader is not the office. It is whoever stands in front of this machine next, who may be you having forgotten, or someone who has never seen it.

• What you found, which is often not what was reported. The gap between the two is the most useful sentence on the sheet.
• What you did, in enough detail to be repeated or ruled out. "Repaired fault" tells the next person nothing except that somebody has already been.
• Parts fitted, with references. Not "new contactor" — the part number. The next engineer is standing at a wholesaler with a phone.
• Time on site, start and finish rather than a total. A total is a number someone typed; a start and a finish is a measurement, and only one of the two is worth anything when a customer queries an invoice.
• What is still outstanding. The temporary fix, the part on order, the thing you noticed and had no time for. This is what turns a closed job into the beginning of the next one instead of a surprise.

The signature, and the customer who will not sign

A signature is the customer agreeing that the work described was done. It is worth having, and it is routinely impossible: the caretaker has gone home, the site contact is in a meeting, the job finished at nine at night.

The wrong answers are to hold the sheet open until someone signs, which means it is completed a week later from memory, or to sign it yourself, which makes every signature on every sheet worthless.

The right answer is to make a reason a valid alternative to a signature. "Site unattended at 21:10, left in plant room" is a true record, it prints where the signature would have been, and it is honest about what was and was not confirmed. A sheet that can only be completed one way will be completed dishonestly.

Never edit a signed sheet

Once someone has signed, the document is evidence and the figures on it must stop moving. If it is wrong, the fix is not to correct it — it is to issue a new one, numbered so the relationship is obvious, and keep the original.

The same goes for what the sheet is rendered from. A signed work order regenerated later from job records the office can still edit puts the same signature under a different document. Whatever the customer was handed is what has to be kept.

Four ways they go wrong

• Written for the invoice. A sheet whose detail exists to justify the bill is fine for finance and useless on the next call-out.
• Filed by date. A work order filed against a job and not against the machine cannot answer "has this happened before?", which is the question that actually gets asked.
• Completed in the van at the end of the week. Every hour between the work and the writing costs detail, and the detail lost is always the specific part.
• One sheet covering three machines. Fine for the invoice, unrecoverable afterwards — none of the three has a history now.

How Repair Control does it

A work order is raised off a job and there is exactly one per job — a visit is one visit, and two sheets for it would be two documents a customer could hold that disagree. The reference is minted off the job's, so JOB-2413 produces WO-2413.

The lifecycle is two states: unsigned, then signed. A signature and a written reason are alternatives, checked by the system — the reason prints in place of the signature, so skipping it is a recorded decision rather than a blank. There is no "void" state: voiding a signed sheet keeps the row, bumps the revision, rewrites the reference to WO-2413-R2 and returns it to unsigned, and only a signed sheet can be voided.

The PDF is archived the moment the sheet stops moving, and every later download serves those exact bytes rather than re-rendering from records that may have changed since. Time comes from a clock rather than a text box — start and stop, one row per stretch — and closing the job writes the visit, the parts and the clocked time onto the machine's own record, so the history is a by-product rather than a second job.

Related: what a CMMS is, and how a CMMS differs from field service software — the second of which is really a question about where the finished sheet ends up.