Management Dashboard — Work Orders & Awaab Timeline

Work orders are how you dispatch remedial work and track it against the indicative Awaab's Law timeline. Tiered — Basics for the everyday flow, Deep dive for costing and the statutory clock, Technical for how it's computed.

Looking for the case's overall position — Raised through to Closed, and the honestly-labelled alternatives for summary, photo, presence, and verification — see The lifecycle, end to end. This page focuses on the works arc specifically.

Basics — raising and tracking work

Open Work orders from the sidebar.
Create a work order — only Property address and Description are marked required (a plain \*); everything else defaults sensibly. Case-detail fields for the report (tenant contact, report title/type, reference number, scope of survey) sit behind an "Add report details (optional)" disclosure, and scheduling a visit or sending straight to a contractor sit behind a separate "Assign now (optional)" disclosure — open either only if you need it; the minimal path stays address + description + Create.
Assign it — to an internal surveyor, or to a contractor organisation you have a grant with.
Track its stage as it progresses; the assigned party updates status as they investigate, make safe, and complete works. The Dashboard's "Needs attention" panel surfaces overdue, unassigned and stalled cases in one place (a jump-link takes you to the full overdue list below it); the work-order list itself has its own Overdue (N) quick-filter chip alongside the status/bucket filters.
When a survey is raised for the order, its sealed evidence links back here.

The work-order drawer

Opening a work order shows a tabbed drawer — Overview, Letters & PDFs, Timeline, Assignment & costs — auto-opened to whichever tab matches the case's current stage. All four stay loaded in the background as you switch, so a half-written letter draft or a form you were filling in survives a tab change. Letters & PDFs holds every resident-letter card this case can show right now (see Resident letters, every case stage below); Timeline holds notes, follow-ups, linked evidence and access attempts (including the Awaab's Law statutory clock and written-summary letter for a survey-kind case); Assignment & costs holds who it's assigned to and, where applicable, repair costing.

Deep dive — the Awaab timeline & costing

The indicative Awaab's Law timeline

For a damp-and-mould case, the dashboard shows an indicative timeline with stages counted from a date you choose:

Investigate the hazard — within ~10 days.
Written summary to the resident — a few days later.
Begin repair works — shortly after.

Each stage shows a countdown and an urgency state (on track, due soon, overdue). A presence check-in on site stamps when works began.

Important: this is a planning aid, not a compliance guarantee. Awaab's Law timescales apply to social housing in England, are counted in working days, and are being phased in; this tool counts calendar days from your chosen date. Review and edit the schedule to your policy in Settings before relying on it.

Repair costing (Schedule of Rates)

If you've imported your SOR catalogue (see Repair rates), a work order gains a costing section:

Search your codes by prefix or plain-English keyword (e.g. "sealant").
Add lines with quantities; the estimated total updates live.
From a defect photo, get AI-suggested codes from your own catalogue with quantity estimates — always reviewed before adding.

Works Orders & Sealed Remediation Records

Work orders close the statutory loop by capturing proof of completion. Here's the full cycle:

1. Create works from a survey From an Evidence record, select specific hazards (damp findings, etc.) and create a works order. The works order links to the original survey and records which hazards it will remediate.

2. Assign to operatives or contractors Assign the works order to an operative (a field worker — staff, subcontractor, or contractor-org member) who will perform the repairs. They receive a notification that a job is assigned.

3. Works in progress The operative sees the works job in their mobile capture app (My works jobs), including:

The original hazard photos and scope from the survey
A checklist of findings to remediate
GPS-verified location and scheduling details
Reminders as the due date approaches

4. Completion with photo evidence On site, the operative:

Takes after-repair photos (same GPS and fingerprint chain as survey photos)
Records their location (GPS fix)
Marks the job complete

The system seals a remediation record — a tamper-evident document that proves the work was done, where, and when. It cryptographically chains back to the original survey, creating an unbroken audit trail: survey → works → sealed remediation proof.

Photos can be made optional. If your organisation's capture policy turns off "Require photos for works completion" (Settings → Capture policy), a job can still be completed with zero photos, but a completion note becomes mandatory instead — the system will never accept a wholly empty seal. Those records carry a "Notes Only — No Photo Evidence" chip, so anyone reviewing the file later can see, at a glance, that this record is weaker evidence than the photographed default and honestly labelled as such. The setting is off by default — your organisation opts in deliberately.

5. Verification A coordinator or surveyor can raise a re-survey against the remediated property to verify the hazard is resolved. If the re-survey confirms the fix, the works order is marked verified — the strongest possible proof for regulators or the Housing Ombudsman. If a full re-survey isn't practical, a coordinator can instead verify by attestation — recording that they inspected and accepted the completed works on a site visit, with a mandatory reason — carrying a "Verified By Attestation — No Re-Survey" chip so the weaker path is never mistaken for a re-survey-confirmed one. Either route makes the case eligible to close; see The lifecycle, end to end for the full gate table and the closure reasons.

Portal fallback: if an operative can't access the app, a coordinator can record work completion and upload evidence on their behalf (marked as proxy). A proxy completion carries no presence data — the coordinator isn't on site, so no GPS fix is captured or claimed for it; the record and its report show a "No presence data" indicator instead of a fabricated location.

Resident letters, every case stage

At each meaningful moment in a case — survey scheduled, investigation complete, the Awaab's Law written summary, works scheduled, works completed, an access attempt, case closed — the case detail offers a resident letter: a compose box that's always freely editable and an always-available Insert template button built deterministically from the job's own data (no AI required). Four of those moments also offer an optional Draft with AI starting point using your own AI key — survey scheduled, investigation complete (the cover note for the sealed report), the written summary (the Awaab's Law findings letter, on the Timeline tab alongside the statutory clock), and works scheduled. Works completed, case closed and access-attempt letters only ever offer the deterministic template — never fabricated either way, and every AI draft is always yours to review and edit before it goes anywhere.

The From line defaults to whoever's sending it but stays editable. Once you're happy with the letter, Send emails it to the resident (a copy of the linked report or works-completed PDF is attached automatically where one applies), or use View PDF without sending. Print, Copy letter, and — on the Platform plan — Send to SFTP (the cover letter and, where one applies, its linked artifact) all sit one click away under Other outputs; an organisation without SFTP on its plan simply doesn't see that option at all, rather than a locked/greyed one. A works-completed letter's PDF is kept with the job's evidence afterwards — Regenerate rebuilds and re-stores it if anything changes later.

Access attempts — field and office-logged

Every attempt to gain access for a visit is sealed, hash-chained evidence for Awaab's Law "reasonable attempts" records, shown on the drawer's Timeline tab. A field visit logs its own attempt from the capture app, GPS-anchored. A coordinator can also log an access attempt from the office — a call or report received off-site rather than a field visit — with a reason and an optional note; it's sealed the same tamper-evident way, but carries no GPS and is permanently, visibly marked "Office-Logged — No GPS", at full prominence, never blended in with a field-verified attempt. The Timeline tab always shows an access-attempts control, even before any attempt exists, and its header honestly counts how many of the listed attempts were office-logged. The resident letter for an access attempt states the source in its body and only claims a visit was made when one genuinely was.

Offline & GPS — how it actually works

Operatives sometimes ask how GPS proof-of-completion is supposed to work with no signal on site — here's the short answer:

Satellite GPS needs no phone signal or data connection. Your device's GPS receiver gets its fix directly from satellites overhead, the same way offline turn-by-turn navigation works. A dead spot for calls/data doesn't stop a location fix.
Photos and the GPS fix are captured fully offline, saved to the device immediately. Nothing is lost if you're out of signal for the whole visit.
Sealing the record — the one step that writes the tamper-evident remediation record — needs a connection, because it's a server-authoritative action, not a queued write. If you're offline when you tap Complete, everything you captured stays safely on the device; reconnect and tap Complete again to seal it.
A desktop computer has no GPS hardware at all, so a location fix will never succeed there — that's expected, not a bug. GPS proof-of-completion is a field-device job; from a desk, use the portal's proxy-completion route instead (which, as above, records no presence data — it doesn't pretend the coordinator was on site).

Technical — Notifications & Tracking

The platform notifies team members at key moments:

Works assigned — assigned operative receives a push and in-app alert with job details.
Works reminder — a day before or on the scheduled date, a reminder push.
Works overdue — if a works job overshoots its due date and no completion is recorded, coordinators/managers/admins receive an in-app alert to investigate.

All notifications are audit-logged and visible in your AlertCentre.

Technical — how it's computed

Timeline: stage due-dates are computed from the trigger date and the effective schedule (per-survey override → org schedule → Awaab default), with calendar-correct date arithmetic. The engine is unit-tested and CI-gated.
Scheduling & dispatch: assignment can be assisted by travel-distance suggestions; on-site presence is captured via GPS check-in.
Costing: rates come from your own licensed SOR catalogue, tenant- private; the AI photo-to-code step uses your own AI key and a deterministic keyword ranker — rates are never invented by a model.
Permissions: costing is the landlord's to set; contractors can progress status but not rewrite ownership — enforced by security rules.

Next: The lifecycle, end to end for the full case spine and caveat gates, Repair rates (SOR) (in progress), or back to the help index.