A work order is the smallest complete record a service business produces: one job, on one customer, done by one person, on one date, with what was found and what was fixed. Managing them is not filing. It is making sure the record is created where the work happened, attached to the job that generated it, and findable a year later by the customer name rather than the date. Most businesses have the documents and cannot do the last part.
What a work order has to carry
The customer and the address, the fault or the task, the technician, the date and the time on site, what was done, what parts went in, and a signature or a photograph where one matters. Anything beyond that is optional and anything short of it is a note. The parts that get left off most often are the time on site and the signature, and they are the two that decide whether the record settles an argument later.
Written on site, not that evening
A work order written at the address is a record and one written at nine in the evening is a reconstruction. That is why the app in the van matters more than the screen in the office: if the document cannot be produced where the work happened, somebody retypes it later and the detail that was worth keeping is already gone. Capture the completion in one action, then ask for the detail.
Attached to the job, not to a folder
A work order in a folder of PDFs is searchable by nothing useful. Attached to the job, which is attached to the customer, it answers the question people actually ask: what have we done at this address, and is this the third visit for the same fault. That question is the whole value of keeping them, and it is the one a shared drive cannot answer.
Keeping them because you have to
Business records supporting what you charged and what you paid are kept for tax purposes, and the Internal Revenue Service is specific about the general obligation in Publication 583. Employment records have their own rules again. The practical reason is smaller and more immediate: the day somebody disputes a charge, you want the work order and the schedule in the same place.
Questions people ask about work order management
What is the difference between a work order and a job?
The job is the visit you scheduled. The work order is the record of what happened on it. One job produces one work order; a return visit produces a second one against the same fault.
How long should we keep work orders?
As long as the tax and employment record rules require, and in practice longer, because the useful question is what was done at this address three years ago. Storage is not the constraint.
Do we need signatures?
Where the customer is present and the work is chargeable, yes. It costs one tap on site and it is the only thing that settles a dispute without a conversation.