Work Order Request Form Template

A facilities crew without a work-order system runs on hallway conversations: "the door in B-wing sticks", mentioned once, remembered never. A full CMMS solves that with more software than a small operation wants. This form is the middle path, where every request becomes a timestamped, routable, approvable record, and the discipline in the intro line (one order per fault) keeps each record actionable.

The middle path between hallway and CMMS. Requester name and department establish who to call when the crew arrives and the fault will not reproduce. Building and room number is the dispatch address, since on a campus "the leaky fountain" could be any of nine. The trade selector routes the order to the right skills before anyone triages, because an electrical fault and a grounds job may be handled by different crews or different contractors, and the "not sure" lane exists because misrouted guesses cost more than honest uncertainty. The priority scale leads with an unambiguous safety lane, because a facilities queue must never let a sparking outlet wait behind a squeaky hinge, and the planned-maintenance lane at the other end lets recurring work enter the same pipeline without polluting urgency. The target date captures real constraints, kept separate from priority, since the auditorium must be ready before graduation. Photos, up to three at 10MB each, let the crew arrive with materials instead of a measuring tape. The named approving supervisor makes the accountability chain explicit: labor and materials get spent against a person who said yes.

What intake leaves out. Cost codes and budget lines at intake, since requesters rarely know them and guessing corrupts your ledger, so add codes during approval instead. Multi-fault batching stays out too, because "various items in the gym" is how work orders become archaeology.

Crews that log with it. School and campus facilities teams, manufacturing plant maintenance, hotels and venues, churches and community buildings, and municipal crews, anywhere work requests outnumber the people fixing them.

Wiring it in. Rename trades to match your crews and contractors. Password-protect the form in Settings if orders should come only from staff. Turn on email notifications for the facilities lead, and add a webhook so safety-priority orders ping the duty phone's channel the moment they land. The responses view is the backlog, filtered by trade for the weekly plan, and the CSV export is your audit evidence: every order, timestamped, with priority and approver attached, which is what an insurance inspector or a safety audit asks to see.

One fault, one record. The whole system rests on that discipline. When each order names one problem, one place, one priority, and one approver, the backlog stays honest and nothing lives only in a hallway conversation.