Work order
Also known as: service ticket, job ticket
The structured record of a job to be performed — what's needed, when, where, by whom, and at what price.
A work order is the canonical record of a single unit of field work. It captures who the customer is, what site the work happens at, what's being done, who's assigned, when it's scheduled, what was quoted, what was actually completed, and what the customer was charged. Work orders are the spine of an FSM platform — schedules, dispatch boards, invoices, and reports all derive from them.
In smaller shops, a work order may live on paper or in a single calendar entry. In a digital FSM platform, the work order is a structured row with line items, photos, signatures, timestamps, and links to the customer record. The transition from paper to digital work orders is the single biggest data-quality lift for most service businesses migrating from spreadsheets.
Related terms
Dispatch
Assigning jobs to specific technicians or crews on specific days, with the right skills, parts, and routing in place.
Field service management
Software for coordinating work that happens at customer sites — scheduling, dispatch, quotes, invoicing, and crew tracking.
Service request
An inbound ask from a customer that hasn't yet been scheduled or quoted.
Quote
A proposed price for a job, given to the customer before work starts, that they accept or reject.