Work orders are used to track internal costs against a job, most commonly labour and timesheets. Unlike purchase orders, they do not push costs into your accounting system.

The below video covers in details, we also have the individual steps down below.

Use work orders for costs that come from within your business, such as:

Purchase orders on the other hand are used for external costs such as suppliers and subcontractors. Work orders stay within Buildxact because they are internal costs rather than bills payable to an external supplier.

Tracking these costs is particularly useful for comparing your actual labour against your estimated labour and monitoring job performance.

The recommended way to create a work order is from Actual Costings. Select the relevant estimate line and choose to create a work order. This keeps the actual cost connected to the appropriate budget line.

You can also create a work order directly from the Work Orders screen. This can be useful when entering timesheets manually, particularly if you're entering several employees' hours at once.

You can create multiple work orders against the same estimate line. For example, different employees can have separate work orders for the same labour task.

When completing a work order, Buildxact will ask you to confirm the actual amount used. This allows you to record the hours or cost incurred so far, rather than simply accepting the original estimate.

If you're entering timesheets manually, you can create a work order for a person or group of employees and add their hours as separate lines. Including the date or week in the description can make it easier to identify the time later when reviewing your actual costs.

If you regularly enter the same employees' labour, you can also use Catalogues to save their rates and avoid entering them manually each time.

Buildxact can create work orders automatically from approved timesheets through supported integrations, including:

Once approved timesheets are brought into Buildxact, they can be added as new cost lines or allocated against a specific labour line, depending on your setup.

For setup and configuration details, see the separate help articles for each timesheet integration.

Work orders use Completed rather than Received. Completing a work order is essentially confirming the actual cost or hours that have been used.

Work orders generally aren't sent to suppliers or subcontractors. While they can be sent, this is an uncommon use case and is mainly relevant to specific internal processes such as managing stock or warehouse costs.