A work order is the sheet that turns a phone call into a job a tech can do without calling the office. It's internal: the customer gets an estimate before and an invoice after, and the work order is what lives in between, on the clipboard or the tablet, telling the tech where to go, what the customer said, what to bring, and giving them a place to write down what they found and what they did.
Shops that run on work orders have fewer callbacks, fewer "what did we do at the Garcias' last time" conversations, and invoices that go out the same day. Shops that run on texts to the tech have the opposite. This template is the paper version, built for a service call rather than a factory floor. Fill it in below or skip to the end for the version that writes itself.
What a work order is, and what it isn't
Three documents touch every job, and they answer different questions.
- The estimate answers "what will it cost?" for the customer, before the work.
- The work order answers "what are we doing, where, and who's doing it?" for the shop, and then "what did we actually do?" when the tech fills in the bottom half.
- The invoice answers "what do you owe?" for the customer, after the work, and should be built from the work order rather than from memory.
A purchase order is something else again: it's what a customer or a general contractor issues to you, authorizing the work and giving you a number to put on your invoice. Commercial customers often require a PO number on the work order and the invoice, so the template has a line for it.
What goes on a work order
The top half is the office's; the bottom half is the tech's.
- A number, a date, a priority. The number is how the office, the tech and the invoice refer to the same job. Priority is routine, same day, or emergency; the tech should know which from across the room.
- The customer and the site. Name, the service address (not the billing address), who'll be there, their phone, and the access notes: the gate code, the dog, the key under the mat, the unit on the roof.
- What was requested, in the customer's words. "No cool since Tuesday, outdoor unit hums but the fan isn't spinning, system is about 12 years old." That line saves the tech ten minutes of diagnosis and tells them what to bring.
- The schedule and the assignment. The arrival window the customer was promised, who's going, and a place for time in and time out.
- What was done. The work, one line per thing, with parts used and quantities. This is the half that becomes the invoice.
- What's next. Follow-up needed, a part on order, a replacement recommended, a maintenance plan sold. The office reads this line to know what to do tomorrow.
- A sign-off. The tech's name, and the customer's signature if your shop collects one on site. A customer who signed that the work was done rarely disputes the bill.
Writing the request so the tech doesn't have to call
The office's job on a work order is to make the tech's first ten minutes at the house easy. That means writing down what the customer actually said, not a category. "Water heater" is a category. "Pilot won't stay lit, 40-gallon gas unit in the garage, installed 2016, customer tried relighting twice" is a work order.
Add what the tech should bring if it's guessable from the symptoms: a capacitor and a contactor for a humming outdoor unit, a thermocouple for a pilot that won't hold. And add what they need to know about the house: second-floor unit, attic access through the hall closet, customer works nights so don't ring the bell before ten.
If the customer has history, say so: "Third call this year on this system; last two were refrigerant top-offs." The tech walks in knowing the replacement conversation is coming.
On the truck: the bottom half
The tech's half of the work order is what makes the invoice honest and the records useful.
Time in and time out, written down at the moment, not reconstructed at the end of the day. What was found, in a sentence. What was done, one line per task, with the parts used and how many. The reading or test result if there is one: the capacitor's measured value, the static pressure, the gas pressure. What's recommended and whether the customer said yes, no, or later.
Then the customer signs, if that's your practice, and the tech takes a photo of the sheet or hands it to the office. The invoice gets written from this, line for line, so the customer sees the same words the tech wrote at the house.
From work order to invoice without retyping
Number the work order and put that number on the invoice. When a customer calls about a bill, "work order 2041" finds the sheet, the tech's notes, the parts, and the time, which is usually the whole answer. The IRS's guidance on what records a small business keeps is about receipts and invoices, but the work order is what explains them: it's the document that says why a part was bought and why a customer was charged.
The template's totals section is there so the tech can price the job on site when your shop does that. Amounts add up on this page; carry them to the invoice as they are.
Using the template
Fill it in here and print it, or download the file for Word or Pages. Keep a master with your business details, and either print a stack for the trucks or duplicate it per job in the office. If you run on a tablet, the printed version is the backup for the day the signal drops.
For a maintenance visit, the "work requested" section becomes the checklist: the items you inspect on every tune-up, with a box for each. For a repair, it's the symptoms. For an install, it's the scope from the quote, and the bottom half records the model and serial numbers.
When the template stops being enough
A paper work order works until the third truck. Then the office is retyping the tech's notes into the invoice, the follow-ups live in someone's head, and the customer's history is in a filing cabinet.
In General Dispatch, the work order is written when the job is booked: the customer, the address, what they said on the phone or in the text, the arrival window and who's assigned, all on the job record. The notes the office adds and what was done go on the same job, the customer's history is one screen, and the invoice is created from the job with the same lines, sent as a link and paid by card on the page. Nothing is typed twice. It's part of the $97 a month business plan, and it reads like the sheet below.