🗒️ Work Orders

Support time, recorded the way it is actually worked — a visit, what went wrong, what fixed it — and billed by the hour from that record.

What a work order is

A work order is one visit. The day groups visits, so two trips on the same day stay two work orders — that matters, because the On-Site minimum applies to a visit and two trips are two minimums, not one. Each work order carries a client, a category (On-Site or Off-Site), a date, and the entries of work done in it.

Logging a visit

• Open Work Orders from the sidebar and press “New Work Order”. Choose the client, the category, the date, and (recommended) the agreement that supplies the support rate.
• Give it a short title — it becomes the label on the invoice line (for example, “Finance Desktop”).
• Add each piece of work as an entry: a title, the problem, and the solution, plus the minutes it took.

New work order: the guided flow

Press “New Work Order” and the flow takes the whole window — not a small dialog — and walks you through five steps. A step never blocks silently: if something is missing it says what is missing and which step it belongs to.

• 1. Where / what — the client, the category (On-Site or Off-Site) and the date. The date starts on today, and the client and category are remembered from last time.
• 2. Title & reference — the short title that labels the invoice line, the ticket reference, and the agreement that supplies the support rate.
• 3. Problem — a large writing area. Paste straight from Notepad: paragraphs and line breaks are kept exactly as written.
• 4. Solution — the same, for what fixed it.
• 5. Review & submit — the Start/End times and the minutes they produce, the rounding, whether the On-Site minimum applied, and the billable total, before you commit.

The billable line stays on screen the whole way through, so you always see what the visit will come to before it exists.

Working on an existing work order

Opening a work order uses the workspace layout: the header strip carries the client, the date, the status and the timer; the entries sit on the left; the entry you open sits on the right. The billable line stays pinned underneath, so the money is always in view.

Entries: Problem → Resolution

Problem and Solution are separate fields, because that is the shape the customer recap uses: every line of the daily summary reads problem, then resolution. Write them as you would in your notebook — the summary is written from these words, not re-typed.

• Minutes are stored exactly as you enter them. Nothing is rounded at capture time.
• Enter the Start and End time and the minutes are worked out for you — a 6:30–7:30 visit is 60 minutes. No times at all? Type the minutes directly; nothing is asked for twice. An end before the start counts as crossing midnight (an overnight visit) and says so. The live timer does the same from its own instants.
• The billable amount updates as you type, so you never have to guess what an entry will bill.
• A long Problem or Solution is shortened in the pane so the buttons stay in view — and View opens the whole entry (title, problem, solution, times and minutes) in its own read-only screen with a Print button. The stored text is never altered.

The live timer

The timer runs on the server, not in the browser. Close the tab, reload, or open Saflio on another device — the same timer is still there, with the time it has been running, and a Stop button. Starting a second timer never creates a second one: the one already running is returned instead. That is why the same hour can never be billed twice.

• Start it with the “Timer” button in the entry editor; the running timer appears at the top of the Work Orders page.
• Stop it there too. Stopping stores the raw minutes — rounding happens at billing, never before.

How the money is worked out

• Each entry’s minutes are rounded up to the next 15 minutes (45 min → 0.75 h; 46 min → 1.00 h).
• The entries are then added up within the visit — the visit total is what bills.
• On-Site has a 1-hour minimum per visit; Off-Site bills the actual rounded time with no minimum. Travel is included and is never a billable line.
• The rate is taken from the agreement’s support-rate version that was in force on the service date, and is stored on the entry — so a later rate review never moves an old invoice.

Approval

Work starts as a draft. Submitting it puts it forward; a company owner or admin approves it, and only an approved visit can bill. Approval is one action for the whole visit, and the person who approves is recorded on it. If you are not an owner or admin, the Approve button is not shown at all — there is nothing to click and nothing to fail.

• A voided or billed work order is locked: billing evidence is kept, never quietly changed or destroyed.
• An entry recorded against a device clock (for example, captured offline) is flagged, and still cannot bill until a human approves the visit.

The daily summary

The Daily Summary sub-tab shows one client on one date: the visits, who did the work, the time on site, and every entry as Problem → Resolution. It is exactly what you want to hand a customer, and it creates nothing — it is a read-only view over the same records.

The customer portal: viewing & printing work orders

Your customer’s payment-portal link shows their work orders alongside their invoices. They see only the visits that are approved or billed, and only the customer-safe side of each: the date, the visit title, On-Site or Off-Site, and every entry as Problem → Resolution with the time it took. Rates, totals and anything internal are never shown.

• Each work order has a Print / Save PDF view — a clean sheet with no portal chrome.
• A draft or unapproved visit never appears to the customer.

The email-ready summary

The Work Orders tab in the portal can build a high-level recap of the period — the same Problem → Resolution shape as the daily summary, with a link back to the portal. It is copy-ready: it goes onto your clipboard (or into a box) for YOU to send. Saflio never emails it on its own.

Emailing a work order

An approved or billed work order can be emailed straight to the customer — press “✉️ Email work order”. The email IS the customer’s own view of the visit: the date, the category, the technician, the time on site and every entry as Problem → Resolution, plus a button back to their portal. No rates, totals or internal notes are ever included, because the email is built from the same customer projection the portal serves.

• Nothing is ever sent automatically. A work order is emailed only when you press Send, and editing a work order afterwards never re-sends it.
• The recipient is the customer’s email from their record and you can change it — but the address is always shown first, and Send stays locked until you confirm it.
• “Send test to me” sends the identical email to your own address, so nobody’s first impression is theirs.
• Every send is recorded on the work order — when, to whom and by whom — so “did we send them this?” always has an answer. A resend is its own explicit action.

Putting tracked time on an invoice

The control lives on the invoice, not on the work order. Open a draft invoice and press “Add tracked time”, choose the period, and press Preview to see exactly which visits and hours would be added and what they come to. Nothing is written until you press Add.

• Only approved, unbilled time appears — a visit already on another invoice can never be added twice.
• Only a draft invoice can take tracked time. A sent invoice already went to the customer, and a paid one is history.
• Each hour on the invoice traces back to its entry, its visit, and the technician who did it.

To prepare a recurring cycle’s invoice before the work is added, see Invoices & estimates.

Support rates

Rates live per agreement and per category, and they are versioned rather than edited: adding a rate with a new effective date starts a new version, and entries look up the version in force on their service date. Historical invoices therefore keep the rate they were billed at.

The rate editor is on the Work Orders page, behind “Support rates”. It lists the versions for the agreement you pick, and only a company owner or admin can save one.

If Saflio refuses: a missing rate

Saflio will not capture time that would bill $0.00. If the agreement and category have no rate, the work order names them and offers the fix right there — it is never a dead end, and never a message that just disappears.

• Open the work order: the block names the agreement and the category that are missing a rate.
• Press “Set the rate” — the rate editor opens on that agreement and category, pre-filled with the default (On-Site $75, Off-Site $50).
• Save, and the block clears: capture is unlocked at once. Rates are owner/admin only; anyone else is told to ask one.