Property Management Work Order Template
One record for a tenant request, from the moment it is reported to the line on the owner statement.
- Consent to enter, the notice period and the date notice was given
- The owner approval limit, and the amount this job is over it
- Every cost line split across owner, tenant and insurance
- Habitability flagged separately from priority
Property Management Work Order
Entry, approval and who pays
| # | Tenant and access | Held | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Written consent to enter held | |||
| 2 | Notice given to the tenant | |||
| 3 | Key, code or lockbox recorded |
The document you will get. Download for the full, editable file.
Who this property management work order is for
Four people read this document, and each of them is looking for a different line.
Property manager
You are the one filling it in. Entry permission, the approval limit and the allocation are the three fields that decide whether this job moves today or sits for a week.
Owner or landlord
You are reading the statement. The estimate against the invoice, the variance, and the management fee are what tell you whether the work was controlled.
Tenant
You want to know somebody is coming and when. Classification, habitability and the notified appointment are the entries that answer you.
Vendor or in-house maintenance
You need to get in and get paid. The entry method, the purchase order number and the approved amount are what stop a wasted visit.
Which field matters the most in your sector
The document is the same shape everywhere. What changes is which field carries the weight, and it is usually the one your owner or your regulator asks about first. If you run one of these, the sector page goes further than the template does.
- Commercial real estate
The approval limit. One standing limit per property is what lets a manager act on a hundred units without asking a hundred times.
Portfolio maintenance software - FM service providers
The allocation table. When you bill a client rather than an owner, the recharge column is the line that gets audited.
FM service provider software - Retail and malls
Trading hours and access. A shopfitting repair during trade is a different job from the same repair at midnight.
Retail maintenance software - Education
Occupancy. Whether a room is occupied, vacant or in turnover decides the notice you owe and the window you get.
Campus maintenance software - Healthcare
Habitability and classification. Heat, water and power failures escalate on their own terms, before anyone forms a view.
Healthcare maintenance software - Religious organisations
Volunteer access and consent. Who may let a contractor in, and on whose written authority, is the field most often blank.
Facilities software for religious organisations
What a property management work order should include
A property management work order is the record that takes a tenant request through the right of entry, the owner approval limit and a vendor visit to a settled bill. It names the property and unit, captures consent and notice, tests the estimate against the owner standing limit, and allocates every cost line between owner, tenant and insurance.
A. Fields specific to a property management work order
| Field | What goes in it | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| Property, unit and owner | The address, the unit or suite, and the owner or landlord it belongs to | Three units in one building can have three different owners and three different approval limits. The property alone is not enough to act on. |
| Received via | Phone, email, tenant portal, in person or inspection | Tells you whether a written record already exists. A request taken by phone and never written down is the one that becomes a dispute. |
| Reported issue, in the tenant words | What they said, not your diagnosis | Your diagnosis may be wrong and theirs is evidence. Keeping both is what protects you when the fault turns out to be something else. |
| Classification and habitability | Emergency, urgent, routine or cosmetic, with heat, water, sewage, electricity, security or structural flagged separately | Habitability is a legal test, not a priority. Kept in its own field it escalates without anyone having to argue for it. |
| Permission to enter | Written consent held, the notice period the lease or the law requires, and the date notice was given | The three entries that decide whether a visit is lawful. Missing any one of them turns a repair into a complaint. |
| Standing approval limit | The amount you may spend on this property without asking, the estimate, and the difference | This is the field that unblocks the job. If the difference is zero or negative you proceed; if it is positive you have one call to make and you know it before you travel. |
| Tenant caused | Yes, no, or disputed, with the evidence | Recorded on the day with photos, a recharge holds. Decided months later at the end of a tenancy, it usually does not. |
| Cost allocation | Every line split across owner, tenant, and warranty or insurance | Turns one invoice into three answers. Without it the whole bill lands on the owner statement and the argument starts there. |
| Invoice reconciliation | Estimate, vendor invoice, variance, management fee and the total charged | What makes the statement defensible. A variance nobody noticed is a variance nobody can explain. |
If you cut the form down, keep the approval limit and the amount over it. Everything else can be reconstructed later from an invoice or a photograph. Whether you were authorised to spend cannot, and it is the question that most often leaves a tenant waiting while a manager works out who to ask.
B. What it looks like filled in
The allocation table from a single visit. The last three columns are what the Excel version totals for you, and the reason this page argues for filling them in on the day.
| Cost element | Amount | Owner | Tenant | Warranty or insurance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Replace kitchen mixer tap | 148.00 | 148.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Make good tenant-damaged cabinet door | 96.00 | 0.00 | 96.00 | 0.00 |
| Emergency callout, after hours | 120.00 | 120.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Water damage to flooring | 640.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 640.00 |
| Totals | 1004.00 | 268.00 | 96.00 | 640.00 |
Work order PM-2026-0642, unit 12B, occupied, classification urgent. Standing approval limit 500.00 against an estimate of 1004.00, so the job ran 504.00 over and the owner was asked before anyone attended. The cabinet door was allocated to the tenant on the day, with photographs, while the evidence was still there to see. At a management fee of ten per cent the owner statement carries 294.80, and every figure on it can be traced to a line above.
Word to edit the approval limits and notice periods, Excel to total the owner and tenant split, PDF for the vendor and the file. Free, and yours to rebrand.
How do you fill in a property management work order?
Fill it in the order the job actually happens, and answer the entry question before the repair question. Six steps, and the second is the one that wastes a visit when it is skipped.
Log the request in the tenant words, and classify it
What they reported, where in the unit, and which appliance or system. Set the classification, and flag habitability separately if heat, water, sewage, electricity, security or structure is affected.
Answer the right of entry before anything else
Written consent to enter without the tenant present, the notice period the lease or the law requires, the date notice was given, and how you will get in. A vendor turned away at the door costs the callout anyway.
Price it against the owner standing approval limit
Estimate the work, subtract the limit, and read the answer. Zero or negative and you proceed; positive and you contact the owner, recording the date and the decision.
Allocate every cost line before the vendor attends
Owner, tenant, or warranty and insurance, line by line. Where you are recording tenant damage, take the photographs now and note where they are stored.
Brief and verify the vendor, then notify the tenant
Insurance and licence checked with the expiry, purchase order raised, date scheduled, and the tenant told how and when. All four, in that order.
Reconcile the invoice, update the statement, close with the tenant
Invoice against estimate, explain the variance, add the management fee, post it to the owner statement, and get the tenant to confirm the issue is resolved.
Property management work order vs tenant maintenance request
They arrive together and they are not the same document. One is the tenant telling you something is wrong; the other is you being authorised to fix it.
| Aspect | Property management work order | Tenant maintenance request |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Your authorisation to enter and to spend | The tenant reporting a fault |
| Who creates it | The property manager | The tenant, by portal, call or email |
| The load-bearing fields | Consent to enter, approval limit, cost allocation | The issue, the unit, and how to reach them |
| What it answers | May we enter, may we spend, and who pays | What is broken, and where |
| When it ends | When the statement is updated and the tenant confirms | When it becomes a work order, or is declined with a reason |
| How they connect | One request can raise several work orders, or none | A request that never became a work order is the complaint you hear twice |
Declining a request is still an outcome, and it still needs writing down. The requests that generate disputes are almost never the ones that were refused with a reason. They are the ones that were received, judged not worth a work order, and left with no record that anyone ever looked.
When the template starts to feel limiting
A form handles one unit well. It handles a portfolio badly, and always in the same four ways.
Approval limits drift out of date
Every owner has a different limit and the limits change. Once the form is printed, the number on the page is whatever it was on the day somebody printed it.
Notice periods cannot count themselves
Different leases and different jurisdictions require different notice. Paper cannot warn you that a visit booked for tomorrow needed three days notice given yesterday.
Entry consent is not retrievable
A single consent on a single sheet is compliant only in theory. When a tenant disputes an entry, the question is every entry on that unit for the tenancy, and that is a folder search.
You cannot see the portfolio
Which units keep raising the same repair, how much of your spend is recharged rather than absorbed, which vendors run over estimate. Each answer lives across hundreds of forms, and a folder cannot add them up.
What running this in Facilio looks like
The template is the paper version of this record. The fields are the same ones; the difference is that they stop being ink and start being state the platform can act on.
Work Completion Validator
Consent and approval become conditions of closing
On paper a job is complete when somebody signs it. Work Completion Validator checks the record against what the job required, so a visit closed with no consent held, or a spend closed above the owner limit with no approval logged, is caught while it can still be fixed.
Ops Performance Intelligence
Notice periods and response times run to the lease
The notice each lease requires and the response each classification commits you to become dates the system counts, warning before a visit is booked inside the notice period rather than after the tenant complains.
Audit Report Intelligence
Entry consent and photographs become evidence you can find
Consent, notice, the entry method used and the before and after photographs are logged once against the unit and assembled into the record a tribunal or an owner asks for, instead of being searched for across a tenancy.
Contractor Work Tracker
Vendor cost and markup reconcile on the statement
Insurance expiry, the purchase order, the quote, the invoice and the management fee become the running cost of that unit, so a variance is a number with a reason attached rather than a surprise on a statement.
Your data, your tenant. Atom AI runs against your own Facilio tenant rather than a shared pool, and nothing leaves it to answer a question.
Frequently asked questions
What is a property management work order?
A property management work order is the record that authorises a repair on a rented or managed property and documents who may enter, who approved the spend, and who pays. It captures the property, unit and owner, the request in the tenant words, the classification and habitability, the entry consent and notice, the approval limit test, the vendor visit and the cost allocation.
It differs from a general maintenance work order in two places: permission to enter, and the split between owner, tenant and insurance. A form without those two blocks will not survive a dispute.
What should a property management work order include?
At minimum: a unique work order number, the date and time received and by whom, how it was received, the property, unit and owner, the tenant and their contact, permission to enter with the notice period and the date notice was given, the reported issue in the tenant words, the classification with habitability flagged separately, the owner standing approval limit and the amount over it, the cost allocation across owner, tenant and insurance, the vendor with insurance and licence verified, the work completed, the invoice reconciliation, and closure confirmed by the tenant.
How much notice do I have to give a tenant before entering?
It depends on the lease and on local law, which is why the form has a field for the notice period rather than a fixed number. Twenty four hours is common, forty eight is common, and emergencies affecting habitability or safety are usually exempt.
What the template insists on is that you write down which period applies and the date you actually gave notice. That is the pair of entries a tribunal asks for, and the pair that is almost always missing.
What is a standing approval limit and why does it matter?
It is the amount a manager may spend on a property without asking the owner first, agreed in advance and recorded on the form. Subtract it from the estimate and the answer is either proceed or make one call.
It matters because it converts a judgement into arithmetic. Without it, every repair above trivial waits for someone to work out whether they are allowed, and that wait is what tenants experience as neglect.
Who pays, the owner or the tenant?
The form does not decide it, but it makes the decision explicit and dated. Fair wear and tear and the fabric of the building normally sit with the owner; damage caused by the tenant normally sits with the tenant; a defect in something still under warranty or covered by insurance sits with neither.
Allocate each line at the time, with evidence attached. A recharge argued at the end of a tenancy, months after the photographs would have been easy to take, rarely holds.
What is the difference between a work order and a tenant maintenance request?
The request is the tenant reporting a fault. The work order is your authorisation to enter the unit and spend the owner money to fix it.
One request may raise several work orders, or none at all. A request declined with a written reason is a closed matter; a request declined silently is a complaint you will hear again.
Can I edit and rebrand this template?
Yes. It is free to use, edit, rename and put your own logo on, internally or for clients. No attribution required.
The Word version is the one to edit if you want to change the approval limits, the classifications or the notice periods; the Excel version is the one to use if you want the allocation across owner, tenant and insurance to total itself.
In one paragraph
A property management work order carries one tenant request from the moment it is reported to the line it becomes on an owner statement. Log what the tenant said and classify it, flagging habitability separately. Answer the right of entry first: consent, the notice the lease requires, and the date you gave it. Test the estimate against the owner standing approval limit and act on the difference. Allocate every cost line across owner, tenant and insurance on the day, with photographs where you are recharging. Verify the vendor, notify the tenant, then reconcile the invoice and close with the tenant confirming it is fixed.
The template is the floor, not the ceiling
Take the template; it will carry one request from reported to settled. When one form per repair stops being enough, a connected CMMS runs the portfolio: approval limits held against each property, notice periods the system counts for you, entry consent you can retrieve in a search, and a recharge figure the work orders total themselves.
