Work Orders
Every job has an owner, a status, and a paper trail.
Maintenance and field requests arrive by email, form or phone and then live in someone's head. Run them through a workflow instead: triaged, approved, dispatched, checked off, and closed with a reason.
How it usually goes
A request comes in by email and sits in a shared inbox nobody owns, until the tenant chases it.
Approval for the spend happens over text, so nobody can say later who agreed to it.
The vendor was dispatched, probably. The photos are on someone's phone. The status is "I think it's done".
The workflow you'd draw
Nine steps, four of which deliberately stop and wait for a person. Drag them on a canvas, connect them, and change any of it later.
The request arrives
A tenant emails, or someone creates it by hand. Email lands in the Routing Inbox where you route it into the Work Orders workflow in a click.
Triage by type and urgency
A branch node reads the ticket (trade, property, priority, amount) and sends plumbing one way and an after-hours emergency another. Conditions can be combined with a Match: All / Any toggle.
Assign an owner
Give the job an owner of record, or let someone claim it with Take it from the board. Every change is written to the ticket history.
Approve the spend
Waits for a personAbove your threshold the ticket parks at an approval gate. It does not move until a person approves or rejects, and a rejection can route somewhere different from an approval.
Dispatch the vendor
A bid invitation or a send-email step goes out from your real mailbox, with the ticket details interpolated in and files attached from the ticket.
Wait for the vendor to come back
Waits for a personAn await-reply gate holds the job open until the vendor answers (anyone on the thread counts, including a CC'd coordinator), with a timeout escape if they never do.
Work the on-site checklist
Waits for a personThe tech ticks off the checklist from the board or the ticket. The job cannot skip ahead with items outstanding.
Confirm the photos
Waits for a personBefore and after photos park at a photo-selection gate so a human picks what actually goes in the record.
Resolve with an outcome
Completed, Cancelled, Denied, Duplicate or No action needed, recorded on the ticket and counted in the Outcomes card, so "closed" and "actually fixed" stay different numbers.
The jobs waiting on you, by what they're waiting on
The Kanban board shows the work your workflow has parked, grouped by stage. Approve the spend, tick the checklist, pick the photos, all from the card without opening anything.
What you get past the first week
A closed job can start the invoice
A cross-workflow node opens a ticket in your Accounts Payable workspace when the work order resolves, carrying the fields across. One finished job can never produce two invoices.
Photos and files ride with the ticket
Attachments live on the work order and go out on the emails your workflow sends, from the ticket's private storage.
Vendors and tenants are contacts
Everyone involved is on the ticket with a role (requester, vendor, CC), and the whole thread with them is on their contact activity timeline, across every workspace.
Optional SLA clocks
Turn on first-response and resolution clocks per org, business-hours aware, and jobs at risk show breach badges. Tracking and display only: an SLA never silently changes what a workflow does.
A record that survives an audit
Every step, email, decision and assignment is a history entry with a timestamp and an author. Nobody has to reconstruct who approved what from a Slack scroll.
Editing the process is safe
Change the workflow while jobs are in flight and nothing is silently stranded: tickets on a deleted step say so and offer Move to Step…, and reconnecting an edge un-parks them by itself.
This is a starting point, not a product. RouteWrk ships a Work Orders workspace template and a Work Order Processor workflow template, but nothing about maintenance is hardcoded in the platform. Fields, stages, branches and gates are all yours to change, which is the same reason the same engine runs an invoice queue or a hiring pipeline.
Other ways teams use it
Stop reconstructing what happened.
Start free with the Work Orders template and bend it to your operation.