Bulk Closing Work Order Actions and Starting a New Fiscal Year

This article is for Order Administrators and Order Processors who want to learn how to bulk close work orders and start a new fiscal year in Facilitron Works.

Bulk Actions for Work Orders

When M&O has many work orders that are stale from prior years, PM’s that are no longer valid, or in-progress work orders where the worker has changed positions, the department needs a way to close or re-assign those work orders. The best way to do this in Facilitron Works is to use the Bulk Action page. To access this page, go to Work Orders > Bulk Action.

From this page, you can filter for a specific set of work orders, select a few or all on the current page, or choose all associated work orders and then change the worker or status, in bulk.

a. After selecting your work order filters, you may select "Remember Search Filter" so that the same filters will populate the next time you access the page. Click "Apply Filter" after you’ve selected the desired criteria.

b. Here you can select one work order, or all of the work orders on the current page with the topmost checkbox. In the middle of the blue bar, you can click the link to select all work orders brought up by the filters.

c. In the Bulk Actions area, you can select a worker to move all related work orders to and/or bulk change the status, simultaneously. For the closed date, if a work order has an existing closed date due to its status (e.g. “Closed - Pending Review”), that existing closed date will remain. However, any work orders being closed (that is, being put into a closed disposition via the status), will use the stated date or today's date if left blank. All closed work orders are required to have a closed date set.

Next, add the action taken and select "Send Update Notification", if desired, then click the "Apply Action" button. Not selecting "Send Update Notification" is treated like silently updating the work order. 

Closing and Locking Last Year's Work Orders

The bulk action page enables Works users to move work orders in bulk to a status called "Locked - Fiscal Year Closed". This status will prevent a previous year's work orders from being edited, so as not to interfere with budget reports (i.e., so no one mistakenly edits a work order's costs that you may have submitted for state-required reporting). If there is a need to change this status or edit the work order, please go to Manage > Web Site Configuration > Lock/Unlock Closed Work Orders. Then, apply the date range of the work order that was locked, click "Apply Criteria", then click "Unlock the 'Locked FY-Closed'" work orders button. From here, you will have access to edit the work order.

Starting a New Fiscal Year

When starting a new fiscal year, the budget and work order prefix likely need to be reset. Since many school districts and other property owners will draft budgets based on the fiscal year, Facilitron Works allows property owners to easily create and manage fiscal years in the system. 

For reporting, the fiscal year may be set to start at the beginning of a particular month. In most cases, this will usually be July. This setting applies to the dashboard area of Facilitron Works, where you can filter the page to show year-over-year data by fiscal year.

To set the fiscal year budgets to zero, go to Manage > Web Site Configuration > Budget Accounts, then click "Manage Beginning Balances". This allows you to have basic cost reporting by fiscal year from the budgeting page.

You may also change the work order prefix as the Facilitron Works system was designed to display one to standardize work order naming. The prefix is completely optional, but most property owners like to set it to a fiscal-year related prefix such as “FY24-25”.  If desired, an Order Administrator or the designated Facilitron account manager will change the work order prefix from the current fiscal year to the new one at the end of June. The work order numbering may also be reset to 0 at this time (i.e., you can assign the starting work order seed number each year, but most property owners do not). Please reach out to your account manager for more information.