Work Order Management Software

Businesspeople looking at Work Order Management Software may actually require construction accounting software especially if they are involved with projects.

Work Order Management Software is targeted at other industries, typically field service and equipment maintenance. It covers similar elements – jobs, time allocated, people assigned, material issued and billing details, but there are some major differences.

Work Order Management Software highlights non-project based features such as Escalation Management so that priorities can be reassigned when pre-defined elapsed time limits have passed without appropriate responses from field staff. Even the assignment of work may involve a sophisticated allocation system based on roles and responsibilities, current location and workloads.

Maintenance users would also require extra field for information specifying the serial number and warranty details of the equipment under contract. Finally a software based dispatch board would typically be in place so that field staff or subcontractors can be alerted to newly assigned work.

These issues are based upon field service companies emphasising customer service. A construction company by comparison has fewer clients but higher value contracts with projects extending over a longer time – not jobs that take 2 hours, but projects that last 2 years.

On the other hand there are special requirements that the construction industry requires, such as withholding part of the payments to subcontractors (retentions), producing contract documents with specific clauses for suppliers, applying an earned value approach to profit reporting in the general ledger and managing risk. All of these are omitted from the standard Work Order Management Software systems.