Painting Work Order Template: What the Crew Needs

A work order is the document that turns a sold job into a day of work. It is the only piece of
paperwork in a painting business that nobody outside the company ever sees, which is exactly why it
tends to be the worst one.

The test for a work order is simple and unforgiving: can a painter who was not at the quote start
the job from this sheet without phoning you? Most work orders fail it, and the cost shows up as
interruptions, wrong products bought, and half days lost to something nobody wrote down.

What a work order is not

It is not the quote, and it is not the scope of work. The quote is a commercial document written
to persuade. The scope is a contractual document written to define. The work order is an operational
document written to instruct, and it should be shorter than both.

Copying the scope into the work order is the most common mistake. A scope contains exclusions,
assumptions and commercial language a crew does not need and will not read. What the crew needs is
what to do, in what order, with what, and what to watch out for. If the scope structure is the
question, that is covered separately in
the painting scope of work structure.

The header

Job number, property address, customer name and a contact number for site. Then three fields that
are habitually left off and cause most of the avoidable calls:

• Access arrangement. Key safe code, who is meeting the crew, or the neighbour
  holding a key. Written down, not remembered by whoever quoted.
• Parking and unloading. Especially on terraced streets, apartments and anywhere
  with a permit scheme.
• Occupancy. Whether anyone is living there, working from home, sleeping after
  night shifts, or has pets or small children. This changes how a crew works all day.

Occupancy is worth its own line because it is the field with the largest effect on how the day
actually goes and it is almost never recorded. A crew that arrives expecting an empty house and
finds someone on calls in the next room will work differently, and would have planned differently if
they had known.

The work itself

Written as tasks in sequence, not as a description of the finished result. The useful unit is
something a painter can complete and tick.

The expected time column is the one that changes behaviour. A crew given a list with no time
against it works at whatever pace the day suggests. A crew that can see what you allowed will tell
you when it is wrong, which is information you cannot get any other way and which feeds directly
into painting production rates.

Publish the times as expectations rather than targets. A number presented as a target invites
corner cutting on preparation, which is precisely the work that does not show until later.

Materials

List what is going to site and who is bringing it. Split into what has been ordered and delivered,
what the crew collects on the way, and what is already in the van.

Include quantities, and include the waste allowance you priced rather than the bare calculated
figure, so the crew is not working to a number that was never realistic. That allowance is covered
in painting material waste factor, and the underlying calculation in
estimating paint and material costs.

Add a line for colour codes with the room against each. A crew holding a work order that says
walls, named product, matt still has to guess which of three greys, and the resulting mistake costs
a full recoat. The record of what was agreed lives on
the colour approval form, and the codes should be copied here rather
than referenced.

The watch out section

Three or four lines, written by whoever surveyed the job, covering anything the crew would
otherwise discover the hard way. This is the highest value part of the document and takes a minute
to write.

• Surfaces in poor condition, and where.
• Anything fragile, expensive or awkward in the working area.
• Known substrate problems: previous gloss, distemper, damp patches, failed filler.
• Anything the customer was particular about during the quote.

That last one repays itself repeatedly. A customer who spent ten minutes at the quote talking
about the skirting will inspect the skirting, and a crew that knows will finish it differently.
Passing on what the surveyor learned is the whole reason the document exists.

What to leave off

Prices. A work order carrying the job value tells a crew what the company is charging, and on a
sheet that gets left on a windowsill it can tell the customer what you paid for labour. Neither
conversation helps anyone.

The exception is where painters are paid by output rather than by time, in which case the rate for
their portion has to appear or they cannot check their own pay. The trade offs there are in
hourly rate versus piece rate.

Leave off the commercial terms too. Payment schedule, deposit status and warranty wording belong
in the contract file, not on a sheet in a van.

Leave off the customer’s full history as well. A note saying this customer was difficult about
the last job travels badly, and a sheet left on a kitchen counter has a way of being read. Anything
you would not want the customer to see does not belong on a document that goes to their house.
Genuine site risks are different and belong in the watch out section, phrased as facts about the
building rather than opinions about the people in it.

Who fills it in, and when

Whoever surveyed the job writes it, on the day they survey, not the night before the work starts.
The detail that makes a work order valuable is exactly the detail that fades: the state of the
skirting, where the customer wants the van, the fact that the back gate sticks.

The crew completes the done boxes and the actual time against each task as they go, and it comes
back with them. A work order that does not return is a scheduling document only, which throws away
half its value. What comes back is what tells you whether the job was priced correctly, and that
record belongs in tracking painting job costs.

Where the work order comes from

It should be generated from the job record rather than typed fresh, because anything typed twice
eventually disagrees with itself. The chain runs quote to scope to work order, with each document
narrowing the last: the quote establishes the money, the scope establishes the obligation, and the
work order extracts only the instructions.

What that means in practice is that the surface list on the work order should be traceable back to
the scope line by line. When a customer later says the utility room was included, the answer comes
from the scope. When a painter says nobody told them about the utility room, the answer comes from
the work order. Both need to exist and both need to agree.

The failure worth naming: work orders built from the quote rather than from the scope. Quotes
routinely group work into headline items to look clean, and a crew handed decorate ground floor as
their instruction will make ten decisions that were already made for them in a document they never
saw. If the estimate itself is the weak link, that is
writing a painting estimate.

The end of day block

Five lines at the bottom of the sheet, completed before the crew leaves. They cost a minute and
they remove most of the friction from the following morning.

• What was finished, against the task list above.
• What is wet or curing, and what must not be touched.
• Material used, and anything now short.
• Anything discovered that was not on the sheet.
• Anything the customer said during the day.

The fourth line is the early warning system for change orders. A crew that notes rot behind a
downpipe at four in the afternoon gives you the chance to raise the paperwork that evening, before
anybody has done the work for free. The mechanics of that are on
the change order structure.

The fifth catches something else entirely. Customers say things to painters that they never say
to the person who quoted, including that they are thinking about having the outside done next year.
A line on a work order is the cheapest lead source a painting business has, and it goes straight
into the follow up habits described in
getting repeat painting customers.

Multi day and multi crew jobs

One work order per crew per day, generated from the job’s task list, rather than one long sheet
covering the whole job. Long sheets get ignored because most of what is on them is not today’s work.

Carry two extra fields when work spans days: what was left wet or curing at the end of the
previous day, and what is blocked waiting on somebody else. Both are the sort of thing that gets
mentioned verbally at handover between crews and forgotten by the time the second crew is on site.
Where jobs overlap or hand over mid week, the scheduling logic behind it is in
scheduling painting jobs, and the staffing question in
painting crew size.

Keeping the completed sheets

The returned work order carries actual times against your expected times, which is the raw
material for correcting the next estimate on that type of work. Discarding them once the job is
invoiced throws away the only record of how long the work really took, and rebuilding it from
memory a season later is not possible.

File them with the job rather than in a chronological pile. The question you will want to answer
later is how long cabinet work takes us, not what happened in March, and a pile sorted by date
cannot answer it without somebody reading every sheet.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a work order if I work alone?

Less formally, but the survey to start gap still exists even when it is the same person on both
ends. A short task list with products and colour codes stops the return trip to the merchant, which
is the main cost a solo painter pays for not having one.

Paper or an app?

Whatever gets filled in. Paper wins in wet, dusty conditions and where phone signal is poor. An
app wins when you want actual times back without transcribing them. The wrong answer is a system
where the crew fills in paper and somebody retypes it later, because that step gets skipped.

How detailed should the task list be?

Detailed enough that each line is a thing that gets finished. Lines that take more than about half
a day stop being useful, because the done box never gets ticked and you cannot see progress.

Should the customer see the work order?

There is no harm in it, and it often impresses, but it is not written for them and it should not
be edited to be. If a customer asks what is happening today, the work order answers it well.

What if the crew ignores it?

Usually the document is too long, or the times on it have never been right, in which case the
crew has learned it is fiction. Both are fixable, and both are worth fixing before concluding the
crew is the problem. Related habits are covered in
managing a painting crew.

Does the work order replace the schedule?

No. The schedule says which jobs happen when across the business. The work order says what happens
on one job on one day. They are different documents solving different problems.