Quickstart: create and close your first work order

One work order from request to closed, end to end.

This runs a single maintenance job through every step Maintain has: create it on the board, assign it, start it, tick a checklist item, complete it, and sign it off. Work on the web, at /<organization>/maintenance.

For what Maintain is, read Overview: maintenance management. Getting your maintenance team onto the board is on Give people access to Maintain.

This is the happy path. Recurring work, parts and the other entry points are branches, linked where you pass them.

1. Create a work order

A work order is one maintenance job: a title, a machine, the people doing it, and what they need. It is the only object Maintain has.

1. Select Maintain in the top navigation. The board opens at /<organization>/maintenance.
2. Select the blue + above the board. The New Maintenance Workorder modal opens.
3. Type the problem into Work order title. Write what is wrong rather than what to do, so the technician can judge it: Spindle coolant leak at the rear seal tells them more than Fix the mill.
4. Select the Group chip and pick a group, for example Hydraulics. A group is a named, colored bucket for the kind of work. If your organization has none yet, type a name into Group name... in the same dropdown, pick a color, and create it there.
5. Select the Asset chip and pick the machine the work is on.
6. Select Create.

The New Maintenance Workorder modal, opened from the blue + above the board.

Create stays grayed out until the work order has both a title and a group. Every other chip in that row is optional now and editable later from the drawer, so leave priority, due date and parts alone on this pass. Filling them in properly is Create a maintenance work order.

A green Maintenance workorder created toast confirms it and the new card appears on the board. A red Failed to create workorder means nothing was saved: the modal stays open with everything you typed, so retry Create.

2. Assign it

1. Select the new card on the board. It opens in a drawer beside the list, and the address gains ?selected_wo= with the work order's id, so that link goes straight back to it.
2. In the drawer, select Assignees.
3. Pick a person or a team from the list. A toast naming the handle you added confirms it.

The assignee picker in the work-order drawer, open over the list of people and teams.

Add as many assignees as the job needs; select a name again to remove it. Assign a person, not a team, when one named person owns the outcome. A team assignment tells four people the work exists and none of them that it is theirs.

3. Start it

A status says where a work order is in its life. There are five: Open, In Progress, On Hold, Done and Approved. Everything created lands on Open.

Select In Progress in the status row at the top of the drawer. The row is five buttons, one per status; each shows only an icon until it is the live status, and then it widens to show its label. The board card updates as soon as you select it.

Two of those labels are not the status name. The first button reads Not Started when it is active, and the fourth reads Completed. The statuses are still Open and Done, which is what the board card, the status filter and the reports call them.

The status row in the work-order drawer, with In Progress selected.

Nothing forces the order: any status can follow any other. On Hold is for work that started and then stalled, waiting on a part or on the machine coming free. What each status means is on Update, discuss, and close a work order.

4. Add a checklist item and tick it

A checklist is the list of small steps inside one work order, ticked off as the work happens.

1. In the drawer, open the Checklist section.
2. Type a step into Add a task..., for example Isolate and lock out the machine.
3. Select the blue + beside the field. A Task added toast confirms it.
4. Select the circle beside the item to tick it. The text strikes through and the green progress bar above the list fills.

A checklist item, ticked, with the progress bar above it filled.

You do not need a checklist if the title already says the whole job. Checklists earn their keep on work nobody should improvise: a lockout sequence, a PM route with eight lubrication points, an inspection somebody has to sign for.

5. Complete it

Select the fourth button in the status row, the check-circle. A Task completed! toast confirms it and the card moves on the board. The button widens and reads Completed; the status is Done.

The fourth status button, selected. It reads Completed; the status it sets is Done, and it closes the work order.

Done is the transition that moves stock. If the work order lists parts it requires or creates, a dialog opens first and you confirm what was actually consumed and produced. Yours lists no parts, so it closes straight away. The parts path is How work orders move stock.

6. Approve it

Select Approved, the fifth button in the status row. This is the sign-off: the work is done and somebody has checked it.

The Approved button, the last status in the row, marked with a stamp icon.

Stock already moved at Done, so Approved moves nothing further. Skip it if your team has no review step, and keep using Done as the end of the line.

7. What you just built

One work order, from a title somebody typed to a signed-off record. That record is the machine's maintenance history: filter the board by that asset and the job is there, with who did it, what they ticked off, and when it closed.

Three branches open from here:

• The work came from the floor, not from you. Operators report problems from a phone, from the job they are running, or from the board. See Submit a maintenance request.
• The work repeats. A quarterly lubrication is a work order with a recurrence rule on it, not a separate object. See Schedule preventive maintenance.
• There is more than one of these now. Group, filter and lay out the backlog across four views on Organize work on the maintenance board.

See also

• Create a maintenance work order
• Update, discuss, and close a work order
• Organize work on the maintenance board
• Work order fields and statuses