Work Order Cost & Labor Logger

The problem this kills

You can tell someone how many work orders your team closed last month. Can you tell them what those work orders actually cost - broken down by asset, by location, by trade? For most facilities teams the honest answer is "not without a half-day of spreadsheet archaeology." Labor hours live in one place, the parts came off a stockroom sheet, and the vendor invoice is a PDF buried in an inbox. Nobody ties them back to the specific work order, so the real cost of maintaining each pump, rooftop unit, or building is a guess.

That guess is expensive. You can't see the asset that quietly eats 40% of your repair budget. You can't catch the vendor invoice that doubled. You close work orders without anyone signing off on the total, so cost overruns surface only at month-end when it's too late to question them.

This Implementation Plan builds the tool that fixes it - and it tailors itself to your trades, your assets, and your approval rules before it builds a thing.

What you'll build

A simple, login-protected web app for your maintenance team:

• Open work orders import from your existing CSV or Google Sheet - no integration required.
• Log labor by picking a trade and entering hours; the tool multiplies hours by your rate automatically.
• Add parts from your price list, with quantities, so material cost adds up as you go.
• Attach vendor invoices (PDF or scan) right onto the work order, with a duplicate guard so the same invoice can't be logged twice.
• Auto-calculated total cost = labor + parts + invoices, visible in real time.
• A supervisor approval gate: before any work order is marked Closed, a supervisor reviews the full cost and approves. Costs over a threshold you set get flagged for extra scrutiny.
• Cost reports rolled up by asset and by location, plus a clean CSV export in the exact columns your accounting system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• It starts by interviewing you. The very first thing the plan does is ask about your business - your trades and rates, how your assets and locations are named and coded, your typical and peak work-order volumes, your approval thresholds, and your messy edge cases. It reads back a short tailored spec, you give a thumbs-up, and only then does it build. You get a tool shaped around how you actually work, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.
• A step-by-step build, each step ending in a ready-to-paste prompt for your AI coding agent.
• The full data model (work orders, labor lines, parts lines, invoice attachments, cost ledger) adapted to your real fields and naming.
• The labor-cost math (rate x hours), the asset/location roll-up, and the over-threshold flag.
• The CSV import for work orders and rates, and the CSV export for your cost ledger.
• A verification checklist so you know it actually works before you trust it.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy spreadsheet replacement - it's built like an internal system of record should be:

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own work orders and costs.
• A complete audit trail - who logged what hours, who added which part, who approved which cost, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the tool drafts the total cost, a supervisor reviews and approves, and only then is the work order closed and the cost committed to the report. Nothing closes itself.
• Duplicate guards so the same invoice or the same work order can't be processed twice.

Who it's for

• Maintenance coordinators who log the work and need the numbers to add up.
• Facilities finance owners who need real cost-by-asset and cost-by-location figures, not estimates.
• Maintenance supervisors who want to approve the spend before a work order is closed and the cost is locked in.

If you've ever been asked "what does it actually cost us to keep that building running?" and had to shrug - this is your tool.

You've got this. Paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor it to your shop.