What Is a Work Order? [+ 4 Templates]

Businesses and commercial entities consider work orders the source of truth for everything involving a monetary budget and jobs to be done.

Documentation is an inseparable function of any business, whether online or offline. During a business’s lifecycle, you will come across many commercial documents like invoices, standard operating procedures (SOP), bills of supply, etc. 

One highly regarded document is a service ticket, and upon issuance, your business machinery starts to deliver the products/services and earns revenue on completion of the order.    

Internal or external business job orders could be highly confusing if you do not have experience creating and managing such documents. But not to worry since this article will help you gain sufficient knowledge on this business component. Without further ado, read it through. 

What Is Work Order?

When you receive an order of work from a client, it is a formal request for maintenance, product delivery, service provisioning, etc. Work tickets are indispensable in formal business, whether the task is highly complex, like constructing a power plant, or pretty simple, like delivering computer accessories.

Such official documents vary from industry to industry. However, the standard information they contain is the primary deliverables, start date, end date, reporting person, executing person, and the ordering person.

Also, a business paper trail starts with a work order. When the task progresses and the document passes from one hand to another, it works as a formal communication medium between involved parties. 

And finally, when the job is done, accountants use this document to settle accounts receivables or payables. Furthermore, external or internal auditors first go for job orders when auditing any business.

Other phrases that business people could use in place of work orders are:

• Service ticket
• Job order
• Work ticket 
• Job ticket

The Purpose of Order for Works

The sole purpose of such a document is to keep a record of all work authorizations, service provider details, costs, and work completion time. External clients like consumers and internal clients like employees can create a service ticket.

Then, the paper goes to the right team, depending on whether it is an external or internal order for work. Companies often use computer software to create vouchers that travel through many digital or physical desks.

Here find at a glance list of objectives of order for work: 

• Explain the issue, repair, and installation/delivery of goods
• Provision of resources and equipment needed for the job or maintenance work
• Offer technicians with elaborate instructions on the job/task/maintenance
• Officially recording the materials, labor, and resources consumed for work completion
• Track all repair and maintenance jobs that have been performed on each authorization
• Contains monetary data like cost, taxes, levies, cess, etc. 

Work Order Management Terms

Work Approver

An administrative or someone from that team handles the assignment and approval of maintenance demands for equipment management. Sometimes, front desk support of customer relations and the warehouse in charge can also carry out the approver role.  

Work Requester

The requester is an individual or a team who demands a specific job to be completed. Consumers generate job orders through online or in-person purchases in the services and goods industry. 

In business-to-business scenarios, commercial-level clients can request work, or it could also come from an internal team, like a customer service operations manager requests workstation repairs.   

Field Technicians

In maintenance job tickets, field technicians are engineers, millwrights, repair persons, etc., who possess the skills to execute the task mentioned in the work order document.   

The Components of a Work Order

A business can record many items and related data using job order documents. Here are some example items that you must include.

Mandatory Elements

#1. The asset is the primary component of any job ticket.

#2. The work requester’s name is also a must.

#3. Scope of work is yet another essential item since it will determine the skills, tools, and standard operating procedure (SOP).

#4. The work requester should also fill a field named Description of Issue. It helps the technicians or service facilitator to understand the problem quickly.

#5. Machinery part replacements or special tool requirements should also be in the document.

#6. All businesses have some sort of health hazards. It should be mentioned in the work order.

#7. Dates and times are highly required too. There could be a start date, start time, end date (expected), end time (expected), actual end date/time, etc.

#8. A service order should also include contact details for the requester, order manager, technician, etc. Thus, you can include mobile numbers, telephone numbers, FAX IDs, email addresses, websites, office addresses, etc.

Voluntary Components

#9. A job ticket may contain multiple signatory fields for the customer, manager, technician, accountant, etc. 

#10. Hours of work should also be present for appropriate billing and reconciliations.

#11. Having a list of tasks in a service order form is good. It will enable the work order manager, facilitator, and customer to stay in sync about the work done.

#12. Modern service ticket formats also come with a dedicated field for the importance of the order. For example, depending on the priority level, managers plan service orders.

#13. You may also want to include a checklist of tools, computer applications, spare parts, consumables, etc., to be checked out and returned to the inventory.

#14. You could include the estimated cost of the job delivered for open-cost orders. For blanket orders with predetermined pricing, some businesses mention the actual cost.

#15. Finally, an order ID and a job title should be there because it helps you to document the job ticket.                      

Types of Work Orders

Preventive Maintenance

Any business’s manufacturing or production units issue job tickets for equipment servicing. It helps to avoid machinery breakdown and production losses. 

General Purpose

Companies issue service tickets when they need a third party to complete a one-time task like removing unused equipment, installing antivirus on laptops, etc. 

Inspection of Machinery

Companies approve one-time work orders for inspection by a third-party expert to evaluate equipment, assets, or tools.

Electrical

Internal or external clients can request power supply, lighting, and wiring needs through such documents. 

Emergency

Such job orders are mostly unplanned to tackle accidents. You may issue such orders to protect the life of staff or save costly equipment from permanent damages. 

Special Projects

Sometimes, you need to upgrade the production unit without replacing existing machines. You specially request equipment or software upgrades that increase productivity using this work ticket.

The Benefits of Using Work Orders

#1. Your business is documenting all the job tickets with necessary records. The auditing agency will ask for these records whenever there is any audit to validate your company’s performance.

#2. You make your business more transparent by involving service tickets for every service provisioning. Clients love to deal with agencies who are particular about work documentation and sharing the data collected with them.

#3. Quickly pay internal or external technicians by looking at the work order and keeping them happy.

#4. Help the inventory team procure all the spare parts in advance so that machinery maintenance does not hit any bottlenecks.

#5. Analyze job order notes and take appropriate measures to avoid any breakdown of machines in the future.

#6. Service and product-centered businesses can reasonably estimate the year’s revenue by reviewing the completed and billed service order documents.

#7. Finally, work orders function as a thread of communications between multiple departments. Hence, your business units can eliminate the adverse effects of working in silos.     

Here are some platforms where you can find ready-made templates:  

Printable Work Order Templates: TemplateLab

TemplateLap is one of the most trusted sources for authentic business documents. You will also find high-quality templates, forms, and formats for work/job orders here. Its content is easy to download.

Unlike some competitors, you do not need to disclose a bunch of information about yourself or the company to get a download link.

Simply locate the form relevant to your commercial or personal work and click on the download button to get the file. Furthermore, you can easily open the template files using any word and spreadsheet processing apps like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, and Google Sheets.

The site showcases a broad range of service ticket examples like: 

• Examples of automotive repair works
• Templates for maintenance work
• Forms for IT work
• Examples of graphic design outsourcing work

Moreover, these templates contain less restricted formatting, so you can personalize the tables and columns the way you want.      

Free Work Order Templates: Smartsheet

Smartsheet helps you to integrate job tickets into your project management system. Since it is a proprietary project management software provider, if you use its free-to-download templates and import the document into Smartsheet, you invest no money but automate the entire process of receiving and solving service tickets.

Some notable templates that you can put to good use are:

• Maintenance job tickets
• Service work job orders
• Stop work service tickets
• Landscaping work ticket
• All job order tracking templates 

Its hosted templates come in two content delivery methods. First, you can download the example file in PDF, Excel, or Word format and customize that in a desktop application that supports these file types.

Alternatively, you can import the templates into your Smartsheet project dashboard. The second method is highly convenient for fast-moving and complex environments where service ticket approvers and managers must manage hundreds of work orders.   

Work Order Templates: Jotform

If you are a freelancer or small business owner who needs to serve large business clients who demand formal job order documents, you can try out templates from Jotform. It helps you to save money on several grounds like: 

• Commissioning professional business from creators
• Purchasing licenses of work order management software
• Appointing business document experts who can create such job tickets for you

Instead, you just use the easy-to-customize templates and import them to Jotform’s proprietary online PDF editor. Both the services are free for commercial usage.

Notable service ticket templates that you can use are: 

• Customer product setup
• Vehicle servicing
• Auto repair
• Maintenance
• Website design
• Video production
• Pet grooming
• Freelance web development 

Moreover, you do not need to possess extensive technical skills to use Jotforms editor. It is a simple drag-and-drop PDF editor tool that anyone who knows how to operate a web browser can use. 

Work Order Templates: Template.net

Template.net is yet another popular destination for personal and business use documents. It has a relatively easy search bar where you can type your requirements like documents, templates, graphic designs, etc., and the platform will retrieve some high-quality examples.

Its Business section lets you access some extraordinary work order examples that you can customize directly on its editor or using word processing apps. However, its free usage facility is somewhat restricted.

First off, you need to subscribe to a free or paid account. Then, you can download up to three templates each day, it is a free account. Alternatively, you can use the editor. Anyways, there will be a download limit. 

However, it lets you download your job orders in various file formats like Apple Pages, Apple Numbers, Google Sheets, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and Excel.   

Conclusion

Work order is all about a paper trail. The digital transformation of businesses across industries is now a trail of PDFs, Google Docs, or Microsoft Word files on a tablet, laptop, or mobile phone.

In a nutshell, it outlines the work to be completed, by when, by whom, and the cost of the task. Your business workforce starts completing tasks when a job order has been generated, and the workforce rests when the revenue is posted on company books according to standard accounting terms.

Now that you have gone through an in-depth discussion on service tickets and some template sources, you should be able to create high-performing copies of such documents.

A successful business needs more than just an order for work. You must make informed decisions on which task to accept or pass by getting suggestions from the best expert networks.