A work order is the record opened for a motorcycle when it arrives and kept open until it is handed back. It holds the customer, the bike, the complaint, the work performed, the parts fitted, the mechanic and the amount. It is the workshop's smallest unit of measurement: profitability, mechanic commission and service history all come out of it.
What belongs in a work order
Eight fields are mandatory. Every missing field is a question you will not be able to answer later.
| Field | Why it is needed |
|---|---|
| Customer and phone | Service reminders go through it |
| Plate / VIN | Service history attaches to the bike |
| Mileage | The next service interval is calculated from it |
| Customer complaint | In the customer's own words, not translated into jargon |
| Diagnosis | The actual fault the mechanic found |
| Work performed | What was done — read back to the customer at handover |
| Parts used | Comes off stock, goes into cost |
| Mechanic and duration | Commission and labour are calculated from it |
Complaint and diagnosis are separate fields. The customer says "there's a noise"; the mechanic writes "chain tensioner slack". Merging them into one field loses what you tell the customer at handover.
How to open one
At intake, before the bike even reaches the bench. The order is:
- Search the plate. If the customer has been before, the record opens with the history. If not, create the customer and bike record.
- Write the mileage. A one-second job that the whole of service tracking depends on.
- Write the complaint in the customer's words. Do not abbreviate.
- Assign the mechanic. Whoever is working on it gets the work order.
- Take photos. Scratches, cracks and missing parts at intake. Most handover disputes end at this step.
That is thirty seconds. If it takes longer, nobody will do it — which is exactly what you should be measuring when choosing software.
Moving across a Kanban board
A work order is not a piece of paper, it is a state. As work progresses the state changes. A typical flow has five columns:
Accepted → Waiting on parts → On the bench → Testing → Ready for handover
The real value of the board is this: walk into the workshop and see at a glance how many jobs are open, how many are waiting on parts, how many are finished. If the "waiting on parts" column is swollen, you have a supply problem — visible that day, not in the month-end report.
Drag and drop matters. If changing a state means opening a form, mechanics will not update it and the board will lie.
The link to parts and stock
The part a mechanic writes on the work order should come off stock by itself. Without that link you are keeping two separate records, and within weeks they will not agree.
Each part line needs three things: quantity, purchase price, sale price. Without the purchase price you cannot calculate the profit on that job — which is where profitability starts.
Before closing the work order
Four checks:
- Is the work performed field filled? This is the text you read to the customer.
- Was the duration entered? Labour and commission are calculated from it.
- Are there photos? A photo of the finished state ends the next argument.
- Is the next service date or mileage flagged? The reminder triggers from it.
Then the invoice. Moving from work order to invoice should be a single step; if you are retyping the line items, the system is only half installed.
What a closed work order is worth
Once closed, a work order is not an archive, it is data:
- Service history. When a customer asks "what did you do last year?", the answer takes ten seconds.
- Service reminders. Mileage plus date gives you the timing of the next call. We wrote about maintenance tracking separately.
- Mechanic performance. Who finished how many jobs, and how long each took on average.
- Parts consumption. How many of each part moves per month — order quantities come from here.
- Profitability. Parts cost per job, labour, and the margin left over.
All five depend on one habit: filling the work order completely. It is possible in a notebook but not readable; we covered that gap in the migration post.
In Ridebase Garage work orders move across a Kanban board, parts come off stock automatically, and the invoice is issued from the same screen — details on the motorcycle service software page.