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: every request becomes a timestamped, routable, approvable record, and the discipline in the intro line — one order per fault — keeps each record actionable.

Why these fields. 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; on a campus, "the leaky fountain" could be any of nine. The trade selector routes the order to the right skills before anyone triages — 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; the planned-maintenance lane at the other end lets recurring work enter the same pipeline without polluting urgency. The target date captures real constraints — the auditorium must be ready before graduation — separate from priority. Photos, up to three at 10MB each, let the crew arrive with materials instead of a measuring tape. And the named approving supervisor makes the accountability chain explicit: labor and materials get spent against a person who said yes.

What we left out. Cost codes and budget lines at intake — requesters rarely know them and guessing corrupts your ledger; add codes during approval instead. Also multi-fault batching: "various items in the gym" is how work orders become archaeology.

Who uses this. 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.

Make it yours. 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 immediately. The responses view is the backlog — filter by trade for the weekly plan — and the CSV export is your audit evidence: every order, timestamped, with priority and approver attached, which is exactly 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.