Part 3 — Run Your Operation · Chapter 15

The Life of a Work Order

Part 2 built the machine. Part 3 runs it, and running BigWave means living on the work order screen, because a work order is where every feature you configured converges on one actual job. This chapter tours that screen completely, which makes it the reference the next eight chapters keep pointing back into.

Creating work orders

Four doors into the same record:

  • Home page, Global, Create Work Order. The general path. Pick project, customer, site, describe the job.
  • From a customer or site. The same form with the customer or site pre-filled. This is intake during a phone call.
  • From Project Setup, Create Work Order(s). Bulk creation across chosen sites, usually from a template. Chapters 9 and 22.
  • From the portal. Customers raising their own requests, arriving in your first status with an alert if you configured one.

However it’s born, the work order lands in its project’s first status carrying whatever its template pre-filled.

Cloning. An existing work order can be cloned when the same job recurs: same site, same setup, new work order. Faster than a template for one-offs that happen to repeat.

The screen, panel by panel

Details is the master record: description, project, customer and site, status, and the core dates. The status dropdown here is where most status changes physically happen. When the customer, site or template carries standing notes, buttons surface them on this panel, Customer Notes and Site Notes and Dispatcher Notes, so the warning entered on the site record months ago confronts the dispatcher on every job at that site.

Schedule and Assign. When the job happens and who does it. The next chapter, entirely.

Time / Materials / Expenses. Hours worked, parts used, costs incurred, priced by the machinery from chapter 11. Visible to internal users and technicians. Chapter 17 enters these from the field. Chapter 19 bills them.

Comments is the job’s conversation: timestamped, attributed, permanent. Comment prefills from chapter 5 speed the repetitive ones. Enforce one discipline here. Anything about the job that currently lives in a text thread belongs on this panel, because this is where the next person will look.

Documents. Everything filed on the job, in your chapter 12 folders. Add Document uploads, and photos from the field land here too. Generate… merges a document template into a filled-in file on the spot.

Deliverables. The required-document checklist, showing 2 of 3 complete in the panel list itself.

Assets, when your license includes asset management. Which registered equipment this job serviced. Linking the work order to the panel it inspected is what builds the per-asset history chapter 20 relies on.

Quote / Invoice. The money panel, internal only. Line items from every source, ad hoc and rates and materials and timecards, plus the generation of quotes and invoices. Chapters 18 and 19.

Supplier Orders. Purchase orders to suppliers for parts bought for this job. Chapter 21.

Technician Ratings. Score the assigned techs against your rating categories, if you use them.

Workflows. Any chapter 7 workflows riding this work order, such as a permit application mid-process.

Custom Fields, grouped as defined, including the site’s fields when the project surfaces them. Audit Trail closes the list: every change, who, when.

Role note: this is the internal view. A technician sees the field-relevant panels, chapter 17. A customer login sees details, status, permitted documents and approved invoices, chapter 14.

Statuses in practice

The mechanics are one dropdown, so practice is about habits.

  • Change the status when the thing happens, not at day’s end. Everything downstream, alerts and timers and portal and pipeline counts, is only as truthful as the timestamp.
  • Comment on the why for any backward or unusual move. “Back to Scheduled: customer postponed, panel on backorder” costs nine seconds and saves the archaeology later.
  • Watch statuses, not work orders. Priya doesn’t review jobs one by one. She keeps All Work Orders views per status, chapter 3, and works the queues.

Commercial (Harbor Grill): an ad-hoc call at HG-007 arrives through the portal, lands in New with an alert to Priya, and the screen already shows the site’s gate code, the manager’s cell, and the standing site note about the back-entrance breaker room.

Residential (the Okafors): their panel upgrade is one work order from the quick start onward. By the time chapters 18 and 19 quote and invoice it, everything those chapters need is sitting on panels this chapter named.

Habits

  1. One job, one work order. Two visits for one job is a schedule with two entries, next chapter, not two work orders.
  2. The description is the tech’s first briefing. Write it to be read on a phone in a parking lot.
  3. Photos and documents go on the work order the day they exist, not when someone’s back at the office.
  4. Trust the panel counts. Comments (4), Deliverables 1/3, Documents (6) read as a dashboard before you click anything.