Understanding work orders
A work order is a unit of maintenance work, tracked from the moment it is raised to the moment it is closed. It records who did the work, how long it took, what it cost, and what was found.
Requirements
- Available on: Orbit, Odyssey, Cosmos
- Roles: Owner, Admin and Manager can create, assign and close. Employees work on orders assigned to them. Viewers cannot see work orders.
Every work order belongs to an asset
There are no free-floating work orders. This is what makes the cost land somewhere useful: when a work order closes, UniAsset writes a service record against the asset automatically, and that cost flows into the asset's total cost of ownership.
The three types
| Type | What it is | How it usually starts |
|---|---|---|
| Preventive | Scheduled work done to stop a failure happening | Raised automatically by an overdue PM rule, or manually |
| Corrective | Unplanned repair after something has broken or failed | Raised manually when a fault is reported, or automatically by a failed checklist item |
| Inspection | A formal check with no repair expected — a safety audit, a calibration check | Raised manually against a compliance schedule |
See Corrective maintenance for the unplanned path.
The four priorities
Priority sets how quickly the work is expected to be responded to.
| Priority | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Emergency | Safety risk, or the operation has stopped |
| Urgent | Significant operational impact |
| Routine | Non-critical work; operations continue meanwhile |
| Planned | Known future work, carried out on a scheduled date |
On Odyssey and above, priority feeds the SLA engine, which computes a response deadline from your configured response hours and the asset's criticality. Without the SLA engine, priority is still recorded and still orders your queue — there is just no automatic deadline attached.
What a work order holds
- Assignee — who is doing the work
- Estimated and actual minutes
- Labour cost and material cost
- Scheduled and due dates
- Resolution notes
- An approval threshold for cost sign-off
Attached to it:
- Notes — either internal-only or visible to everyone
- Materials — parts consumed, with quantity, unit cost and vendor
- Photos — tagged before, during and after
- A checklist — one completed inspection per order
Work orders are not service records
This is the distinction worth getting right.
| Work order | Service record | |
|---|---|---|
| Tense | Work to be done, or in progress | Work already done |
| Has a lifecycle | Yes — open through closed | No |
| Created by | You, a PM rule, or a failed checklist item | You, or automatically when a work order closes |
Related articles
Need Help?
If you have questions not covered in this article, our support team is here to help.
Contact Support