Work orders
Raising, tracking and completing maintenance work, and the five things completion changes.
A work order is one piece of maintenance work on one vehicle, from the moment it is reported to the moment it is closed. Some you raise yourself; many arrive on their own, raised by an inspection defect. Either way the work order is where cost, labour and downtime are recorded, and completing one updates the fleet in five places at once.
Who can do this
- Role
- Administrators
- Permission
work-orders:readwork-orders:writework-orders:delete
Drivers do not raise work orders directly. They record a defect on an inspection, and the work order follows from its severity.
What a work order carries
Four fields are required: the type, the priority, the vehicle, and the reported issue. Everything else — diagnosis, assigned technician, mileage at creation, notes — is filled in as the work progresses.
The work order number is generated for you in the form WO-20260729-0001, numbered per day within your organisation. It is the reference to quote; the underlying id is not shown anywhere useful.
Two optional links matter more than they look. Setting a service schedule means completing the work order rolls that schedule forward. Setting an inspection — which happens automatically for auto-raised work — means the inspection is resolved once all of its work orders are done.
| Type | When to use it | Typical origin |
|---|---|---|
| Preventive | Scheduled servicing before anything fails | A due service schedule |
| Corrective | A fault that needs fixing but is not urgent | Raised by an admin |
| Emergency | A breakdown or safety issue in the field | Raised by an admin |
| Inspection | Work arising from a recorded defect | Raised automatically by an inspection |
The status track
Six statuses. The first four are yours to move between freely; the last two are terminal.
- 1
Open
Maintenance → Work OrdersReported, not yet picked up. The starting state for everything.
- 2
Assigned
A technician owns it. The technician is a name on the record, not a Cooriroo user — external garages fit here as well as in-house staff.
- 3
In progress
Work has started. Moving into this status stamps the start time, which is what the average-resolution figure in fleet health is measured from.
- 4
On hold
Waiting on a part, an approval or a slot. Still counts as active work.
- 5
Completed
The work is done and costed. This is reached through the complete action, not by changing the status field.
- 6
Closed
Administratively finished. Use it for work orders that were raised and then turned out not to be needed.
Completing a work order
Completion asks for what was done and what it cost. Only the work performed is mandatory; labour hours, labour cost, parts description and parts cost are optional, and the total cost is the sum of the two cost figures rather than a field you type.
Completing then does five things:
- writes a maintenance log entry carrying the cost and the mileage;
- stamps the vehicle’s last maintenance date;
- rolls the linked service schedule forward, if there is one — new last-performed date, and a new due date and mileage from the schedule’s intervals;
- returns the vehicle from In maintenance to Active, if no other work orders are still active on it and no failed inspection requires immediate attention;
- resolves the linked inspection to passed with defects, once every work order raised by that inspection is completed or closed.
The vehicle’s health score is recalculated in the background afterwards, so the score you see immediately after completing may be a few seconds behind.
Priority decides whether the vehicle stops
Priority runs critical, high, medium, low. Creating a work order at critical or high moves the vehicle straight to In maintenance; medium and low leave it running. That makes priority an operational decision, not a queueing preference — pick high only when you genuinely want the vehicle off the road today.
Priority also weighs on the repair-burden part of the health score, and it is what the automatic work orders inherit from inspection severity: a major defect becomes high, a critical defect becomes critical.
Drafting from free text
The work orders list has an AI draft action: pick a vehicle, paste what the driver phoned in, and it proposes a type, a priority, a reported issue, a diagnosis, a parts description and an estimated labour figure, with a confidence score. Nothing is saved until you review it in the normal form. The action is rate limited, so it is for drafting one work order at a time, not for bulk entry.
When something looks wrong
Saving fails with a message about the work order being modified by another request
Two people had the record open and one saved first.
Work orders are protected against concurrent edits rather than letting the second save silently overwrite the first. Reload the work order, check what the other person changed, and reapply your edit.
A work order I was working on has vanished
Its inspection was edited, and open work orders are rebuilt from the new items.
Editing the items on an inspection deletes the still-open work orders it raised and raises them again from the new item list. Completed and closed ones survive. If you are diagnosing an auto-raised work order, complete it before anyone edits the inspection behind it.
The vehicle is still In maintenance after I completed the last work order
A failed inspection still carries an item flagged as requiring immediate attention.
The restore-to-active check looks at both work orders and inspections. Open the vehicle’s failed inspections and clear the immediate-attention flag on the item that has been dealt with.
I cannot correct the cost on a work order I closed yesterday
Completed and closed work orders are immutable.
There is no reopen. The maintenance log entry written at completion is the record; add a correcting entry against the vehicle rather than trying to edit history.
Terminology
Your organisation can rename these. If your screens say something else, this is what they mean here.
- Vehicle
- The asset the work order is raised against. Some tenants call these trucks, vans, units or assets.Rename it in Settings → Terminology