Guides

Work order vs service request: what's the difference?

The two words get used interchangeably, but they describe different steps. Keeping the difference clear helps a small team decide what to work on instead of reacting to whoever called last.

Service request

A service request (also called a maintenance request or a ticket) comes from someone who noticed a problem: a tenant, an employee, a customer, the front desk. It says what they saw, in their words: “The hallway light is out.” It may be vague, a duplicate of something already reported, or not your job at all.

Work order

A work order is the decision to do something about it. Someone on the team reviews the request, decides it’s real and in scope, and turns it into an instruction: what to do, where, who does it, how urgent, and by when. The work order is what gets assigned, tracked and closed.

Why the split helps

• Triage. Five people may report the same broken door. You want one work order, not five.
• Priority. The person reporting thinks their problem is urgent. The team decides what actually is.
• Records. The work order holds what was done. The request holds who asked and when, which matters if there’s ever a dispute.

How small teams usually handle it

On a crew of three, a separate request system is overkill. A simple way to keep the benefits: let requests come in through one channel (a form or link, not everyone’s personal phone), land them as open work orders, and have one person assign or close them each morning. Duplicates get closed with a note pointing at the original.

That’s how the request link in MaintenanceRequestDesk works: each request becomes an open order on the board with the requester’s name, and they get an email when it’s done.