Creating a work order

A work order is one job for one client: what needs to be done, where, and roughly when. Creating one takes a minute.

This article covers the creation itself. Booking the actual visits into the calendar is the next step. See the scheduling article.

Before you start

Two things make this quicker:

The client should exist under "Clients", with the address where the work will happen.
The services you want to add should exist in your catalog. See the services article.

Step by step

1
Click "New Work Order"
Open "Work Orders" in the sidebar on the left, then click the "New Work Order" button in the top-right corner of the page. The "Create Work Order" dialog opens.
2
Choose the client, the object and the contact person
In the "Client Information" section, open the "Client" dropdown and pick who the job is for: a private person is listed by name, a company by its name with its primary contact person in brackets; typing part of either finds them. Then open "Service Address" and pick the object where the work will happen. If the client has several objects, they are all listed, so choose the right one. Last, open the "Contact person" dropdown under it: it lists the people of that object (or, when the object has nobody of its own, the client's contact persons), primary first and already selected. With a single person the dropdown is greyed out and simply shows their name. The person you pick here is the one contact of this work order: the "Work Orders" list and the calendar name them in brackets, the phone and email shown on the work order are theirs, the technician's "Call" button dials them, and the act of work names them. Later changes to who is primary never move an existing work order; change its contact here when needed.
Opened from the "Contact person" dropdown under the address: the object's people, the primary first.
3
Add the services
Under "Planned services", click "Add line" and a new row appears. Pick a service in it; its price and duration fill in automatically. Set the quantity ("Qty") if there is more than one. To put in several services in one go, use "Add multiple lines"; the next section shows how.
Creating a work order for Charlotte Hughes: planned services with amounts, prices and times.
4
Check the totals
The "Totals" row under the last service line adds up the price and time of all lines. The total time is how much calendar time the job will need. On each line you can edit either the "Unit price" or the "Total Price"; the other recalculates on its own.
5
Set a planning window (optional)
In the "Scheduling" section, under "Planning window", pick a "Start date" and an "End date" if the job should ideally happen between certain dates. You can leave both empty.
6
Add notes and save
Write anything the team should know into the "Additional Notes" box, for example "Call before arriving, the intercom is broken." Then press the "Create" button at the bottom of the dialog.

Adding several services at once

When a job needs more than a service or two, adding lines one at a time gets slow. The "Add multiple lines" button under the service lines opens a small list of your whole catalog instead.

The Planned services section with the Add multiple lines button highlighted — The highlighted "Add multiple lines" button sits next to "Add line" under the service lines.

Tick every service the job needs; the search box at the top narrows the list as you type, and "Select all" ticks everything the search currently shows. Press "Add", and each ticked service becomes its own line with its price and duration already filled in, ready to adjust.

The Add multiple lines list open, with a search box, Select all and several services ticked — Pick as many services as you need and press "Add": every ticked one becomes a line.

Attaching files

Anything the team should have at hand can live right on the work order: a photo of the broken part, the signed offer as a PDF, a floor plan, a spreadsheet. In the work order dialog, the "Files" card sits on the right; click "Add" in it and pick one or several files.

The Files card in the work order dialog with a photo and a PDF attached — The "Files" card: photos show as thumbnails, documents by their type and name.

Images, PDF, Word, Excel, CSV and text files are accepted, up to 10 MB each. Photos show as thumbnails and open in a full-screen viewer; documents open in a new browser tab. Drag the tiles around to reorder them, or point at one and click the X to remove it. The changes are applied when you save the work order.

Technicians see the same files in their app and can add their own from the field, so photos from the site arrive on the work order by themselves. On acts of work, the "Photos" block prints the attached images; documents stay on the work order and are never printed.

What happens after saving

The new work order appears in the "Work Orders" list with "Not Scheduled" in its "Status" column: it exists, but no visit is booked yet. The list itself does a lot of work for you, with tabs, filters and bulk actions; see working with the work orders list.

The work orders list showing the new work order with the Not Scheduled status — The new work order in the list, with status "Not Scheduled", waiting to be booked.

It also joins the "Not Scheduled Work Orders" panel on the Calendar page. Click the small arrow tab at the right edge of the screen to slide the panel out (the orange counter on the tab shows how many work orders are waiting). How to book it, by dragging it into the calendar or letting ServisGo suggest a time, is covered in the scheduling article.

Creating a job the client has ordered before? Do not retype it: find the earlier work order in the list and pick "Copy" from its three-dot menu. Copying a work order carries over the client, services, workers and notes, and the copy opens ready to adjust.