Work Order Template
One work order that fits any job and any trade, kept deliberately short so it actually gets filled in.
- Six sections: one page to raise it, one to close it
- Labour and parts in one table, not two
- Costs total themselves, with tax optional
- A status that says why a job is not finished
Work Order
Any job, any trade
| # | Labour or part | Qty | Rate | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Labour, replace failed door closer | |||
| 2 | Part, door closer, medium duty | |||
| 3 | Labour, adjust latch on return visit |
The document you will get. Download for the full, editable file.
Who this work order template is for
Four people touch a work order, and on a small team it is sometimes the same person wearing four hats.
Whoever raises the job
You may not be in maintenance at all. Location, what needs doing and anything to know before arriving are the three entries that decide whether the first visit succeeds.
Technician or tradesperson
You are filling in the second half. One table for labour and parts means you record the job as it happened rather than translating it into two lists.
Supervisor or owner
You are approving it. Priority, complete-by date and the status field are what tell you which jobs are actually done and which are quietly waiting.
Whoever does the books
You need the money to add up. Subtotal, an optional tax rate and a total are all you want from a job sheet, and they are on one line each.
Which field matters the most in your sector
The form is the same shape everywhere. What changes is which field carries the weight, and it is usually the one that decides whether the job is done in one visit. If you run one of these, the sector page goes further than the template does.
- Commercial real estate
Location. Across many buildings, a job with a vague location becomes a job that gets attended twice.
Portfolio maintenance software - FM service providers
The cost block. When the job sheet is also the basis of an invoice, the subtotal and tax lines are what your client checks.
FM service provider software - Corporate facilities
Anything to know before arriving. Occupied hours, access and meeting-room bookings decide when the work can actually happen.
Corporate facilities software - Education
Priority against the complete-by date. Term dates turn routine work into scheduled work and back again.
Campus maintenance software - Retail and malls
The status field. Could not access, during trading hours, is a completely different outcome from part done.
Retail maintenance software - Healthcare
Needs a specialist. Knowing quickly that a job requires a certified trade is what stops it sitting in a general queue.
Healthcare maintenance software
What a work order should include
A work order is the authorised instruction to carry out one job, and the record of what happened when it was done. It carries a unique number, the date raised and who asked, a priority and a completion date, the location and the work required, the labour and parts used, and the cost.
A. What a work order needs, and why each field is there
| Field | What goes in it | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| Work order number | A unique reference such as WO-1042 | The only thing that lets two people talk about the same job without describing it. It is also what a later invoice or query is matched against. |
| Date raised, and requested by | When it came in and who asked | Distinguishes when the job arrived from when somebody got to it. Without both, response time is unmeasurable and the requester is unreachable. |
| Priority | Emergency, urgent, routine or scheduled | Set at intake rather than argued later. Four levels is enough; more than that and nobody uses the middle ones consistently. |
| Complete by | A date, not a wish | A target date makes a job either on time or late. Left open, a job is neither, and it will sit until somebody notices. |
| Location | Building, floor, room or area | Written for someone who has not been there. Precision here is the single biggest factor in whether the first visit is the only visit. |
| Item, asset or equipment | What the work is on | Turns a pile of jobs into a history. If you have asset numbers use them, and if you do not, name the thing plainly. |
| Anything to know before arriving | Access, keys, occupied hours, safety | Four short answers that prevent a wasted trip. This is the field that repays itself fastest on a form this short. |
| Labour and parts, one table | A first column saying which, then description, quantity or hours, rate and amount | Splitting them into two tables is the commonest reason a simple work order stops being simple. One table matches how the job actually happened. |
| Cost | Subtotal, an optional tax rate, and a total | Tax is optional because plenty of internal work orders never carry it. Leave the rate blank and the total is just the subtotal. |
| Status at closure | Complete, part done and return needed, could not access, or needs a specialist | The field that stops a queue lying to you. Three of the four outcomes mean somebody has to go back, and only naming them makes that visible. |
If you cut this form down further, keep the status field. Everything else on the page describes one job. The status is the only entry that tells you the truth about your whole queue, because a list where every job reads complete or open hides the ones that were attended, not finished, and quietly closed anyway.
B. What it looks like filled in
One job on the shared table. Two labour lines, two parts, and the first column doing the work of separating them.
| Labour or part | Description | Qty or hrs | Rate | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | Replace failed door closer | 1.5 | 48.00 | 72.00 |
| Part | Door closer, medium duty, silver | 1 | 61.50 | 61.50 |
| Part | Fixing pack and packer plate | 1 | 8.20 | 8.20 |
| Labour | Adjust latch and re-hang, return visit | 0.5 | 48.00 | 24.00 |
| Subtotal | 165.70 |
Work order WO-1042, second floor, door closer, raised routine with a complete-by date two days out. Four lines on one table, two of them labour and two of them parts. Subtotal 165.70, and at a tax rate of twenty per cent the total comes to 198.84, both of which the Excel version works out for you. The honest line is the last one: a half hour on a return visit to adjust the latch, recorded on the same order rather than raised as a new job, which is how a single door ends up with a truthful history instead of two unrelated records.
Word to edit the priorities, statuses and your own rates, Excel to let the subtotal, tax and total calculate themselves, PDF for the clipboard. Free, and yours to rebrand.
How do you fill in a work order?
Raise the top half, hand it over, and let whoever does the work fill in the bottom half. Six steps, and the last one is the only one people routinely get wrong.
Give it a number and a date
A unique reference and the date it came in, plus who requested it and how to reach them. Everything else on the form can be corrected later; the number cannot be added retrospectively without confusion.
Set a priority and a complete-by date
Emergency, urgent, routine or scheduled, and an actual date. A priority without a date is a feeling, and a date without a priority gives you no way to sequence a busy day.
Say where, and what needs doing
Building, floor, room or area, then the item and the work required. Be more specific about the location than feels necessary, because that is what decides whether the first visit succeeds.
Write down anything needed to get in
Access, keys, occupied hours and safety. On a form this short this is the field that saves the most time, because a wasted visit costs more than the repair.
Record labour and parts on the one table
Say in the first column whether each line is labour or a part, then the description, hours or quantity, rate and amount. Resist the urge to split it into two tables.
Close it with a status that tells the truth
What was actually done, then complete, part done and return needed, could not access, or needs a specialist. Marking a job complete when somebody has to go back is how a queue starts lying to you.
When a simple work order is enough, and when it is not
This template covers most jobs. It is worth knowing where it stops, because using a simple form for work that needs evidence is a false economy.
| Aspect | A simple work order is enough | You need a specialised one |
|---|---|---|
| The job | One trade, one visit, a clear fix | Regulated work, or work on a tracked asset |
| What has to be proved | That it was done and what it cost | Isolation, permits, readings, certificates, chain of custody |
| The asset | Named plainly, or not tracked at all | Identified by tag, with a service history and intervals |
| Who reads it later | A supervisor this week, a bookkeeper this month | An auditor, an insurer or a reliability engineer, in years |
| What is missing if you use this form | Nothing | Meter readings, as-found values, a safety block, a deficiency route |
| The honest test | Would a photograph and a cost satisfy anyone who asks | Would somebody need to reconstruct exactly how it was made safe |
Use this one until it stops fitting, and then use a specialised one for those jobs only. The mistake is not choosing the simple form; it is running a whole operation on it and discovering after an incident that the isolation, the meter reading or the certificate was never captured because there was nowhere to put it.
When the template starts to feel limiting
A simple form handles one job well. That is its point, and it is also where it ends.
Rates go out of date silently
Somebody updates the labour rate, prints a new pad, and both pads stay in circulation. Two jobs the same week are costed differently and nothing on either sheet says which rate was current.
Complete-by dates cannot chase themselves
The date is on the form and the form is in a tray. Nothing escalates when it passes, so the field that was supposed to make jobs measurable only works if somebody reads every sheet.
There is no history for anything
This form does not ask for an asset number, which is the right call for its length and the reason it can never tell you that this door has now been repaired three times.
You cannot see the queue
How many jobs are open, which are overdue, how much has been spent this month, how many were closed as could not access. Each answer lives across every sheet and a folder cannot count them.
What running this in Facilio looks like
The template is the paper version of one job. The fields are the same ones; the difference is that a hundred of them stop being a drawer and start being an operation you can see.
Work Completion Validator
Closing a job means saying what was done
On paper a job is complete when somebody ticks it. Work Completion Validator checks the record against what the job asked for, so an order closed with no description, no hours and no status reason is caught rather than filed as done.
Ops Performance Intelligence
Complete-by dates escalate on their own
The priority you set carries its own clock, so a job about to run late surfaces before the requester chases it, and the jobs that keep running late show up as a pattern rather than as individual excuses.
Contractor Work Tracker
Labour and parts roll up into a cost you can see
Every line on that shared table becomes spend you can total by location, by trade and by month, so the question of where the maintenance budget went has an answer that does not require reading sheets.
Audit Report Intelligence
The jobs that need evidence get somewhere to put it
When a simple job turns out to need an isolation record, a meter reading or a certificate, the fields exist rather than having to be written in a margin, so the record is complete at the point it still can be.
Hallucination-free by design. Atom AI answers from the records in your tenant rather than generating plausible text, so an empty field reads as empty rather than filled in for you.
Frequently asked questions
What is a work order?
A work order is the authorised instruction to carry out one job, and the record of what happened when it was done. It carries a unique number, the date it was raised and who requested it, a priority and a completion date, the location and the work required, who it was assigned to, the labour and parts used, the cost, and a signed confirmation at the end.
It differs from a work request in one important way: a request asks for something, and a work order authorises it. Nothing is committed until the order exists.
What should a work order include?
At minimum: a unique work order number, the date raised, who requested it, the priority, a complete-by date, the location, the item or equipment, the work required, anything needed to get access, who it is assigned to and their trade, the date started, the labour and parts with quantities and rates, a subtotal, an optional tax rate and total, the date completed, what was actually done, a status, and two signatures.
That is six sections and it fits on two pages. Anything more and you are building a specialised form, which is the right thing to do only for the jobs that need it.
Why put labour and parts in the same table?
Because that is how the job happened, and because two tables is the commonest reason a simple work order stops being simple. One table with a first column saying labour or part keeps the whole cost of the job in one place and one running total.
It also means a job that turned out to be labour-only, or parts-only, does not leave an empty table on the page.
What is the difference between a work order and a job sheet?
In practice very little, and the words are used interchangeably. Where people do draw a line, a job sheet tends to be the technician's record of what they did, and a work order is the authorisation plus that record.
This template does both, which is why it is split into a half you raise and a half you close.
Why does the status field have four options rather than two?
Because complete and open hide the two outcomes that matter most. Part done and return needed, and could not access, are both jobs that look finished on a list and are not.
Needs a specialist is the fourth, and it is the one that saves the most time. A job routed to a general queue when it needed a certified trade will sit there until somebody visits and works that out in person.
Is this template suitable for regulated or safety-critical work?
Not on its own. It has nowhere to record an isolation and permit sequence, a meter reading, an as-found value, or a certificate reference, and adding them by hand in a margin is not a record anyone can rely on later.
Use it for ordinary jobs, which is most of them, and use a specialised form for work where somebody may later need to reconstruct exactly how it was made safe.
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 priorities, the status options or your own rates; the Excel version is the one to use if you want the subtotal, tax and total to calculate themselves.
In one paragraph
A work order is the authorised instruction to do one job and the record of what happened. Give it a number and a date, set a priority with a real complete-by date, and describe the location precisely enough for somebody who has never been there. Write down what is needed to get in, because a wasted visit costs more than most repairs. Record labour and parts on the single shared table with the first column saying which, and let the subtotal, the optional tax and the total work themselves out. Then close it with a status that tells the truth: complete, part done, could not access, or needs a specialist.
The template is the floor, not the ceiling
Take the template; it will carry any single job from raised to signed off. When a tray of sheets stops being enough, a connected CMMS runs the queue: complete-by dates that escalate themselves, cost you can total by location and trade, and somewhere to put the evidence on the jobs that turn out to need it.
