Work orders

The operational hub where labor and parts accrue, costs roll up, completed jobs lock, and compliance work produces its inspection record.

A work order is the unit of shop work. Hours and parts accrue against it, cost rolls up from it, and for a compliance job, finishing it is where the inspection record gets filed.

The list

Work Orders lists every work order with its Title, Asset, Priority, Status, and Cost. Click a row to open it.

Work Orders list with four jobs against locomotives and a coach, showing low through urgent priority badges, open, in-progress and complete statuses, and accrued cost

Creating a work order

Click + New Work Order and fill in:

Title and Description.
Asset — one locomotive or one car, chosen from a single list, or — none (general / shop) — for work that is not against a particular piece of equipment. A work order targets at most one asset.
Assigned to — a member of the crew roster, or — unassigned —.
Priority — low, normal, high, or urgent.
Status — a new work order starts open, in_progress, or on_hold. It is completed from its own page once the hours and parts are in.
Due date.

Click Create work order. + New work order on a locomotive's or car's page opens the same form with that asset already chosen.

The work order's page carries the title with its priority and status badges, the asset, and the opened, due, and completed dates. Mark complete, Edit, and Delete are in the header, with ← Work orders to return to the list.

Logging hours

The Labor table shows each entry's date, crew member, hours, rate, and value. To add one, pick the Person, set the Date and Hours, add a note of what was done if you like, and click Log hours. You do not choose volunteer, paid, or contractor, or type a rate: both come from the person's roster record, and the entry is stamped with the rate in force that day. See Labor & volunteer hours.

Paid and contractor hours are the job's labor cost. Volunteer hours are valued at their rate as in-kind and shown on a separate line — they are never added into the work order's cost.

Consuming parts

The Parts consumed table shows date, part, quantity, and cost, with a subtotal. Pick a Part, enter a Qty, and click Consume. This decrements the part's on-hand quantity and records the unit cost at the time of use, in one step, so the job and the stock movement can never disagree. A quantity larger than what is on hand is refused. See Parts inventory.

If the part is not on the shelf, Request parts in the Parts consumed panel starts a requisition tied to this work order, and the work order then lists its requisitions and their status. See Requisitions & vendors.

Fixing a line

While the job is open, every hours and parts line has Edit, which lets you correct it or remove it:

Hours — change the person, the date, the hours, or the notes. Changing the person or the date prices the entry again from the roster, as if it were logged fresh. Fixing only the hours or the notes keeps the rate it was logged at.
Parts — change the part or the quantity. Saving puts the old quantity back on the shelf and takes the new one off, so on-hand stays right; the unit cost captured when it was consumed is kept unless you pick a different part. Remove entry puts the whole quantity back into stock.

Every correction is recorded in the work order's history with who made it.

Cost

The Cost panel shows paid labor, volunteer time (in-kind), parts, and the Total — paid labor plus parts. That total rolls up to the asset and to the railroad, which is what makes per-locomotive maintenance cost meaningful.

Record history

Every change to the work order is listed in the record history with the action, when it happened, who did it, and a fingerprint of the entry — including hours and parts corrections, and every unlock and lock.

Completing and locking

Click Mark complete (or set the status to complete on the edit form). The completion date is stamped, and the work order locks: its details, hours, and parts can no longer change, and it cannot be deleted. The page says it is complete and locked.

If something on a completed work order needs correcting, an organization administrator clicks Unlock for corrections. While it is unlocked only administrators can change it, and every change lands in its record history. Lock again closes the window. An administrator who sets the status back to open hands the job back to everyone, and it locks again when it is completed.

When the work order is against a locomotive, a Produce a compliance record panel offers + New inspection →, prompting you to file the inspection or Form 19 that the maintenance produced. The compliance record is immutable once filed; the work order locks once it is marked complete.

A work order that has hours or parts logged cannot be deleted — remove those entries first, or keep the work order as the record of the job.

Work orders raised for you

RailCompliant opens work orders on its own when a compliance obligation comes due. On the Compliance Due page and a locomotive's Compliance tab, an overdue or due-soon row offers Open WO, and the Compliance Due header offers Open WOs for all overdue to do the whole list at once. Once a work order exists for an obligation the row shows View WO instead, so the same obligation never collects duplicates.

Filing the inspection closes the work order for you. When an inspection is filed complete or approved, RailCompliant completes the open compliance work orders it satisfies — its own tier and the tiers beneath it, and the staybolt-caps work order when a 1472 is filed — and records that against the inspection. It only does so when the obligation then shows as current, so back-filling an old inspection never closes a work order for work that is still owed.

If a locomotive's maintenance cost looks too low, check that paid labor is being logged against work orders rather than tracked elsewhere, and that paid staff have their hourly rate on the roster — the rollup only knows about what was logged here, on an inspection, or on an excursion.