A work order board answers one question at a glance: what is waiting, what is booked, what is being worked on, and what is done. This guide explains how the Work Orders board in Exoserva works today — the columns, the statuses, what dragging a card really does, and a few things to know before you rely on it. Everything below was checked against the release running on 26 September 2026.
Work orders vs jobs
In Exoserva these are two different records:
- Jobs are customer visits you schedule, dispatch and invoice.
- Work orders are maintenance requests tracked against a property — the kind of work property managers, HOAs and facility teams hand out. Every work order needs a property.
A work order is not a folder of jobs: there is no link between the two, and you can’t create an invoice from a work order. If you bill the work, create the invoice separately in Invoices.
Work orders are created by hand on the board, and automatically by preventive maintenance schedules that have auto-create turned on (they run once a day and are titled “PM: …”).
Who can use it
| Role | Work orders |
|---|---|
| Owner, Admin, Director, Manager | Full access |
| Dispatcher | View and update, but can’t create |
| Supervisor | View only |
| Technician | No access |
Dispatchers and supervisors can open the board and update work orders, but the New Work Order button is still shown to them today, and pressing it returns a permissions error. Creating is limited to Owner, Administrator, Director and Manager.
You’ll find it in the sidebar under Jobs → Work Orders.
The board
The board groups statuses into four columns:
| Column | Statuses inside it |
|---|---|
| New | Requested, Approved |
| Scheduled | Assigned, Scheduled |
| In Progress | In Progress, On Hold |
| Completed | Completed, Closed |
Cancelled work orders don’t appear on the board. Cards are sorted by priority (Emergency, Urgent, High, Normal, Low). Emergency cards get a red ring and Urgent cards an orange one, so they stand out in a full column.
Each column header shows a count against a work-in-progress limit — New 15, Scheduled 10, In Progress 8. When a column reaches its limit, a “WIP” tag appears. Treat it as a signal: if In Progress is over 8, adding more work isn’t the fix, closing out work is.
Above the board you can search by title, description or number, filter by priority and property, and export the list to CSV. The board loads up to 200 work orders at a time. On a phone it becomes a card list.
Statuses and what can follow what
Not every move is allowed. These are the valid next statuses:
| From | Can move to |
|---|---|
| Requested | Approved, Assigned, Scheduled, Cancelled |
| Approved | Assigned, Scheduled, Cancelled |
| Assigned | Scheduled, In Progress, On Hold, Cancelled |
| Scheduled | Assigned, In Progress, On Hold, Cancelled |
| In Progress | On Hold, Completed, Cancelled |
| On Hold | Assigned, Scheduled, In Progress, Cancelled |
| Completed | Closed, or back to In Progress (reopen) |
| Cancelled | Requested |
| Closed | Nothing — it’s final |
What dragging a card does
Dragging a card sets its status to the column’s main status — New = Requested, Scheduled = Scheduled, In Progress = In Progress, Completed = Completed. It doesn’t ask for a date or a technician, and the rules above still apply. In practice:
- you can’t drag a card back to New;
- a Requested or Approved card can’t go straight to In Progress;
- a card can only be dropped on Completed from In Progress — an On Hold card sits in the In Progress column but has to be started again first;
- an In Progress card can’t be dragged back to Scheduled.
If a move isn’t allowed, you’ll see a message explaining which statuses are valid.
From request to done
- New Work Order — enter a title, pick the property, category and priority, and optionally a description and estimated cost. It lands in New as Requested.
- Assign a technician from the card’s detail panel. If the work order is still Requested or Approved, the status becomes Assigned and the card moves to Scheduled; assigning one that is further along leaves its status alone.
- Set the date and time with Edit Work Order.
- On the day, Start Work moves it to In Progress.
- Mark Complete once the work is done. There are no On Hold or Close buttons: to put a work order on hold, or to close a completed one, open Edit Work Order and use the Status dropdown, which offers only the statuses that work order may legally move to. (Mark as Scheduled changes the status and nothing else — the date and time live in Edit Work Order.)
- To send the customer a document, attach the work order PDF from the Inbox message box (attachment menu → Recent Work Orders). The PDF includes the description, service address, schedule, technician and non-internal notes, but no costs.
Things to know before you rely on it
- SLA: the “SLA At Risk” tile is not a live risk count. It adds work orders flagged as SLA-breached to every Emergency work order you have ever created — completed, closed and cancelled included — and it ignores the board filters. Nothing in the app flags a breach today, so in practice the tile shows your all-time Emergency count. SLA rules can’t be configured in the app, so don’t build a customer promise on them.
- The Schedule board shows every work order that has a scheduled date — not only the ones whose status is Scheduled — as long as it isn’t cancelled or closed. Its Work Orders toggle controls that layer and is on by default. The layer is loaded with the page, so reload the Schedule after creating or rescheduling a work order.
- The Properties list page is on the Scale plan and up. You can still open a single property and create work orders from its Work Orders tab.
Do you run maintenance work separately from service calls, or on one board? What does your team look at first every morning?