Free Plumbing Work Order Template: Weed Out Work Order Inefficiencies to Streamline Operations and Grow Your Business

Every plumbing job starts with a work order — the form or document that describes the leaky faucet to be repaired or the drain to be unclogged. 

Techs rely on work orders for the information they need to do their tasks correctly and efficiently. And when a job is complete, it’s that same work order that is used for generating the invoice they need to get paid. So it’s essential that they’re detailed and accurate.

Without a well-designed work order template, it can be tough for plumbing contractors to ensure that their techs and CSRs gather and document all of the vital information that their company needs for each and every job.

That’s why we’ve developed a plumbing work order template, available here as a free, downloadable PDF for your use. 

But while a work order template can give contractors a boost, no template alone will solve all of the issues that can often make the work order process less efficient and, ultimately, less profitable than it might be. 

For example:

• Inefficient call booking, confirmation, and dispatching.

• Exorbitant office management overhead.

• Lost, disorganized, and illegible paperwork.

• Inconsistent customer experience.

To solve these issues, businesses are looking to plumbing software like ServiceTitan to streamline the process of creating and processing work orders, and seamlessly connect work orders to the rest of their operation.

» Want to grow your plumbing business? Click here to get a demo.

In this article, we’ll cover:

1. How to download and use our plumbing work order template

2. Inefficiencies that pop up when creating and managing work orders

3. How ServiceTitan solves these issues and streamlines the process

Our plumbing software helps businesses streamline and improve their work order processes to increase efficiency and grow profits. Want to see ServiceTitan in action? Schedule a call for a free product tour.

How to Download and Use Our Free Plumbing Work Order Template

If you’d like to give our free template a try, click here to download the template and get started.

The template includes fillable fields for all of the information that’s essential to include in a work order:

• Customer and payment information

• Job description (complete with a plumbing service checklist)

• Labor, hours, rate, materials, and associated charges

• Service contract opt-in

• Warranty information

• Terms and conditions

A well-designed work order form makes for a great start on improving the business processes associated with work orders. But it’s also merely the beginning of improvement, not the end. 

In other words: a first step.

In our experience, plumbers who add a fresh template to their existing work order processes tend to find themselves facing many of the same issues they had before the work order template was introduced.  

In the next section, we’ll zoom in to explain why exactly that is.  

Persistent Work Order Challenges for Plumbing Businesses

When plumbing contractors run into work order-related issues, they tend to fall into one of three basic categories:

1. Inefficient Booking and Dispatching

Without software for call booking and dispatching, customer service representatives and service techs are often prevented from making the best use of their time. 

Their work order processes lead to slowdowns, confusion, frustration, and mistakes. This is especially true for shops that still rely on paper work orders and plumbing service invoices.

At paper-dependent shops, techs have to rely on the accuracy of their CSR’s note taking (and the legibility of their handwriting) for the basic details of all of their jobs.

The smallest errors — an address or model number misheard or mis-transcribed, say — can cause lengthy delays and unnecessary expenditures:

• Hours of driving around.

• Phone tag with the office or customer.

• Treks to and from the warehouse.

Also, plumbing contractors often don’t have a high-quality GPS system integrated into their business operations. This forces techs to use faulty or outdated maps — whether the digital or old-fashioned kind — which can create further delays that annoy customers and drive up costs.

Paper records, of course, tend to get lost — or rendered useless by oil stains, coffee stains, and the like, sometimes before a tech even arrives at the job in question.

But even if a paper work order is accurate, legible, and intact, it remains a cumbersome instrument. 

At shops that depend on paper, techs have very little flexibility to respond quickly and efficiently to new jobs that come in over the course of the workday.

Even if a newly booked call is around the corner from where they’re currently working, they might have to drive a few miles back to the office to retrieve the relevant work order before heading to the job site.

And once a job is complete, the paperwork cycle starts all over again, in order to create an invoice. 

That invoice, naturally, will be paper, too. It will have to be mailed or delivered by hand. The invoice, too, might well get lost, potentially resulting in payments that arrive late by weeks or more.

2. Exorbitant Overhead

All of that paperwork has to get organized — filed away in ever-fuller cabinets and entered into hard-to-track spreadsheets and charts in programs like: 

• Microsoft Excel

• Microsoft Word

• Google Docs

• Google Sheets

Naturally, someone has to do the organizing.  

One plumbing contractor that we recently spoke to recalled that before they were using ServiceTitan, they actually had to employ someone exclusively to do data entry. 

Day in, day out, all that employee did was type information from work orders and invoices into the computer. 

Sometimes, when things got especially backed up, the company had to draft a worker or two from their accounting department to handle the overflow and prevent the office from drowning in paperwork.

And that’s to say nothing of the employees who were responsible for filing the hard copies.

Needless to mention, this kind of arrangement does not encourage optimal use of time or energy. It can significantly drive up overhead costs, while simultaneously slowing down the overall operation of a plumbing business. 

And filing and data entry aren’t the only areas of inefficiency worth mentioning here. 

Without a best-in-class plumbing software, CSRs have to spend a ton of time manually calling customers to confirm existing work orders. 

These confirmations are important — they help avoid no-shows and missing due dates — but in this day and age, individual confirmation calls simply aren’t a good use of CSR resources. 

They could be spending that time booking new business.    

3. Inconsistent Customer Experience

No matter how well-crafted a plumbing work order form — without plumbing software, inconsistencies are bound to hurt the customer experience. 

This tends to be the case particularly when it comes to converting work orders into invoices.

Plumbing contractors hire techs for their plumbing expertise, their work ethic, reliability, and sometimes for their sales skills. 

Things like spelling, grammar, and writing style, on the other hand, don’t often come up in plumber job interviews. 

When plumbing techs are filling out paperwork by hand, it’s not unusual for them to make some errors — to color a bit outside the lines.

While this kind of thing might seem minor, the result is that customers’ impression of a company can vary a lot depending on the tech they get assigned. 

In a competitive market, presentation matters. It can be the difference between making a polished, professional impression that leads to repeat business and tons of referrals, and appearing amateur or disorganized, encouraging a customer to look elsewhere the next time they need plumbing services.

Particularly for plumbing contractors who are looking to expand, maintaining a sleek, professional, and consistent corporate image is essential. And for shops that depend on pen and paper or low end software for their work order processes, that’s very tough to execute.      

How ServiceTitan Helps Plumbing Contractors Get the Most Out of Their Work Order Process

With ServiceTitan, the costly errors and inefficiencies that tend to plague manual work order processes are easily avoided. Our plumbing software automates virtually every step of the work order and invoicing process, seamlessly integrating them into overall business operations. 

When a job comes in, whether via text, phone, or web booking, CSRs can quickly acquire all of the customer information they need and use it to populate ServiceTitan’s fully customizable work order fields, as shown in the screenshot above.

Booking a new job manually can often take even an experienced CSR up to ten minutes. 

Plumbers using ServiceTitan, on the other hand, report that the process now takes them about four minutes.

In isolation, that six minute difference might not sound like a lot. But over the course of days, weeks, and months, it adds up fast. 

When the assigned tech is ready to head out to a job, they can refer to the “Job Summary” section of the relevant active work order, which will furnish them with the exact specs of what’s in store for them on site. 

The job summary, which is also created by their CSR, saves that tech the trouble of writing up their own summary while they’re conducting their inspection. 

Because ServiceTitan digitizes the work order process, it also means that they don’t need to decipher any messy handwritten notes. 

If a tech feels they’re missing some context that would be helpful to them at a job, or wants to acquire additional information about a customer’s needs, they can pull up that customer’s communication history with their company, as shown above. 

They can also review their work history, acquainting themselves with all of the work that’s previously been done at the home.

And with ServiceTitan, job confirmations are automated. 

According to contractor preference, homeowners receive a text, email, or both the day before a scheduled service call, and another text when the tech is en route to the job site. 

Customers can even track their tech’s arrival via GPS, so that they know, virtually down to the minute, when they’ll get to their home. 

In addition to improving tech performance and making things more convenient for homeowners, these features help to reduce overhead by making techs more efficient and freeing up CSRs to spend more time booking new business. 

Once a job is complete, that work order is effectively converted into an invoice. 

ServiceTitan links all of the elements of a plumbing contractor’s business. 

So CSRs, managers, and even owners back at the office can track techs’ progress while they’re out in the field, assigning and re-assigning them to jobs according to geography, urgency, and other factors, with no need to recall them to headquarters to pick up new work orders.     

In the “Job and Invoice Summary” sections of the job ticket, the tech can double-check all of the selections they’ve made in the course of the job. 

These appear automatically, requiring no additional input from the tech. 

They might review the tasks they’ve added to the invoice from ServiceTitan’s range of customizable pre-built jobs. For example: 

• Repair Water Heater

• Unclog Toilet

• Fix Dripping Shower

• Adjust Water Pressure

• Replace HVAC Filter

Because their company’s pricebook is integrated into their ServiceTitan account, the tech can pick the actual equipment required for the project and the amount of it they’ll need. 

The software will automatically fill in the pricing, eliminating the possibility for human error.

We prepopulate fields like: 

• Invoice number

• Order number

• Type

• Terms

• Invoice date

• Payroll date

• Number of hours worked

• Subtotal

• Tax zone

• Membership discounts

With this work order format, the tech doesn’t have to keep track of such a dizzying array of details while they’re performing their job. 

The arrangement also all but guarantees the accuracy of the final invoice total.

As we’ve noted, in the contracting business, presentation counts — now more than ever. 

Before techs present homeowners with an invoice, they can preview the customer-facing version by selecting the “Print View”, where they’ll find a sleek, professional invoice, complete with their company name and logo, automatically filled out with all of the information they’ve entered up to this point.

Without signatures authorizing both work and payment, future disagreements can arise between plumber and homeowner. 

That’s why we use this screen to prompt both techs and customers to sign on the line, furnishing the documentation required to prove that customers have okayed the work and agreed to pay for it.  

For shops that don’t want to go totally carbonless, the invoice is printable. 

But many of our users prefer to use a digital version, delivered via email, as their primary billing document — even if payment and signatures have been secured on-site.

ServiceTitan’s “Email Invoice” gives customers a digital record of the transaction that they can reference whenever they want, even in the event that they lose their hard copy.  

For many of our users, the Email Invoice represents a huge marketing opportunity. Using one of our plumbing invoice templates, they will use the occasion to send along links to sites like Yelp and Google Reviews.

With our plumbing CRM features, customers’ contact information is always ready at hand — just a click away — and techs can send plumbing work order invoices to owners, property managers, and/or tenants in one shot, all without having to communicate with the office or search an address book for business information.

One of many notable points of distinction between ServiceTitan and most other plumbing software is that it gives contractors the ability to incorporate photo and video into their work order, estimating, and invoicing processes. 

Plumbing techs can document sites before and after, providing unmistakable evidence of the improvements they’ve made to a property.  

Using our annotation tool, techs can even mark up photos to highlight former problem areas — corroded pipes, clogged filters — and the fixes that have been applied. These features are especially valuable when it comes to servicing landlord-owned rental properties. 

Conclusion

A well-designed work order template like the one we’ve shared in this article is a great way for plumbing contractors to start improving their business operations. 

But a new template alone still leaves plenty of room for things to go off track, particularly in a shop that runs on mostly pen and paper, or on a lesser software. Without high-quality plumbing software, contractors are likely to struggle with:

• Inefficient call booking, confirmation, and dispatching.

• Exorbitant office management overhead.

• Lost, disorganized, and illegible paperwork.

• Inconsistent customer experiences.

Even if they’re doing lots of business, these issues can make it difficult for a plumber to keep their head above water. 

By the same token, ServiceTitan anticipates these problems and heads them off at the pass, while also providing tons of additional value. 

ServiceTitan automatically connects work orders to essential business features, including an automated, up-to-date pricebook, inventory management, equipment management, payments, and more. 

In this way, work orders become seamlessly integrated into overall operations, so that contractors can make sure that their revenue grows as they take on new business — maximizing their bottom line.

Our plumbing software helps businesses streamline and improve their work order processes to increase efficiency and grow profits. Want to see ServiceTitan in action? Schedule a call for a free product tour.