What a Work Order Should Contain: The 12-Field Spec

A work order should contain twelve things: an order number, the customer and the invoice recipient (often not the same party), the site address down to the unit or floor, access details (key, door code, key safe, entry phone, lift, parking), a named on-site contact with a mobile number, the scope written as what is included and what is explicitly not, the materials split into van stock and what is on order, the expected time on site, the billing basis with the labour split, any tax-relief flag such as Sweden's ROT deduction, the certificate or protocol the job must produce, and before and after photos. Anything thinner is not a work order. It is a reminder, and whoever invoices on Friday pays for the gap.

That list is the minimum input the rest of your business needs. Three machines read the order afterwards: invoicing, the compliance certificate, and payroll. Each reads a different field, and a blank field makes that machine stop or guess. A guess in invoicing is a credit note. A guess in payroll is a grievance. A guess on a certificate is the one an inspector eventually asks about. A thin order used to be survivable because a human rebuilt it on the phone. That hour is now automated away, and automation has no memory.

The 12 fields a work order should contain, and what breaks without each

The rest of this covers the fields people get wrong. Nobody forgets the address. Everybody forgets the gate code.

Access: the field that decides whether the day happens

Access is not "customer will be home". It answers one question: how does a technician who has never been here get through the door, and what happens if nobody answers?

• Key number and collection point, or key-safe location and code
• Door code, entry-phone name, and which door it opens
• Whether the customer must be present, and a fallback number
• Parking: permit, loading bay, courtyard, or forty minutes circling the block
• Lift and stair access if you are carrying a board or a boiler
• Dogs, alarms, scaffolding, restricted hours in commercial buildings

An aborted visit costs the travel, the slot and the goodwill, and is almost never billable. If you add one field after reading this, make it a mandatory access box that cannot be left empty at booking.

Scope: write verbs, not nouns

"Kitchen" is not a scope. "Bathroom refurb" is not a scope. A scope is a list of things a person does, and a list of things that person does not do.

Included: replace consumer unit with 12-way board, test and certify, make good around the board. Not included: rewiring behind plaster, replacing meter tails (network operator's job), redecorating, removal of the old cooker.

The exclusions are the whole point. Every dispute about extra work is a dispute about a sentence nobody wrote. In Sweden that argument is called ÄTA; in the UK and New Zealand it is a variation, and consumer-contract rules tend to make an unwritten scope the contractor's problem. Put the exclusions on the order and on the quote, and week three lasts thirty seconds.

Materials: three buckets, never one

• On the van — confirmed by the technician before leaving the yard
• Ordered — supplier, order reference, expected delivery, to site or yard
• Customer supplied — and therefore outside your warranty, which the order should say in plain words

The second bucket is where money leaks. Without the supplier reference on the order, the supplier invoice lands four weeks later and nobody can say which job it belongs to. That is unbilled material. Photographing it onto the job card the moment it arrives is the cheapest fix there is.

Expected time: an honest number beats a hopeful one

Expected time tells the planner how many jobs fit in a day and gives you a variance to learn from. Never record the estimate and you never find out that your standard board change takes 5.5 hours, not the 4 you keep quoting. Give an arrival window, not a time. Keep estimate and actual as separate numbers so they can disagree in public. That disagreement is your pricing data.

The tax-relief flag: decide before the invoice, not after

In Sweden this is the ROT deduction. On qualifying repair and maintenance at a private home, the customer's share of the labour cost drops by 30% and you claim the rest from Skatteverket. There is an annual ceiling per person, shared with RUT; the amount changes, so check the current figure at skatteverket.se. Green-tech work such as solar, storage and EV charge points runs on its own separate scheme.

Set the flag before you invoice, because it changes what you must collect: the identity number of each claimant, the property designation or housing-association details, and the split between co-owners. Chasing that afterwards means a credit note and a reissue. Outside Sweden the field still earns its place. In the UK it flags the reduced or zero VAT rate on qualifying work, decided on the order rather than at the invoice run. Elsewhere it is a landlord versus owner-occupier split, or an insurance claim with its own paperwork. Same field, same discipline: set once, at the top of the chain.

Required protocol: name the certificate the job owes

Compliance fails for a boring reason. Nobody told the technician a certificate was due, so nobody tested while the board was still open. The order should name the document. In Sweden that is the egenkontroll for the job type, part of the installer's own quality system under Elsäkerhetsverket's rules rather than an optional extra. In the UK it is the Electrical Installation Certificate or Minor Works Certificate under BS 7671, Part P notification where it applies, or a Gas Safe record. In New Zealand it is the Certificate of Compliance, plus an Electrical Safety Certificate for prescribed work under the Electricity (Safety) Regulations 2010.

The pattern is identical everywhere: the protocol is a field on the order, not a memory. A digital form the technician must complete before the job can close is the only version that survives a wet Friday afternoon.

Photos: name the shots, do not just say "take photos"

• Before: the existing installation, damage already there, the route, the meter reading
• During: anything about to be covered up — cable runs before plaster, pipework before boxing in
• After: the finished work, the label, the tidy site, serial numbers of what you installed

The "during" shots are the ones that pay. A photo of a cable run before it is plastered over is the difference between a short conversation and a claim. Photos must attach to the order number, not a camera roll, or they do not exist when you need them.

What breaks downstream, chain by chain

• Invoicing. Needs the invoice recipient, the billing basis, the labour and material split, and the extra-work log. Miss any of them and you invoice late, wrong, or for less than you did. The quiet loss is extra work that was done, never written down, and therefore free.
• Compliance. Needs the protocol flag and the test values captured on site. Miss it and the job is technically unfinished — you find out at handover, at an inspection, or after an incident.
• Payroll. Needs hours against the order, plus travel and any callout premium. Miss it and the technician reconstructs the week at four on Friday, which is a fiction everyone agrees to believe.

None of the three fails loudly. That is what makes a thin order dangerous: the van goes out, the work gets done, and the failure lands in the accounts three weeks later.

Who fills in what, and when

1. At booking (office): customer, invoice recipient, address, access, on-site contact, expected time, billing basis, tax-relief flag. No technician should invent this in a stairwell.
2. Before the van moves (technician): confirm materials on board, confirm access, confirm the arrival window.
3. On site (technician): hours on the clock, materials used, extra work logged the moment it is agreed, photos, protocol signed off.
4. At close (system): nothing to type. The invoice, the certificate PDF and the payroll line are read off the order.

Step four is the test. If anyone retypes something after the job closes, the order was too thin. A system built around the job card — OdinTask is ours — makes fields mandatory at booking, carries the ROT flag from quote through to invoice, and closes the job only when the protocol and photos are there. Paper can do the same. It is just harder to enforce.

Fill the twelve fields in before the van moves and the rest of the week does what it is told. If you would rather have that as a system than a checklist, start a free trial and put one job through end to end. More in the same vein on the blog.