Work Order Approval: Setting Up a Process That Works

Work order approval is the step where a maintenance request becomes authorised work. Someone with the right authority confirms that the job is needed, that the cost and risk are acceptable, and that the people doing it are cleared to start. Done well, it protects budgets, safety and asset life without slowing down urgent repairs. Done badly, it either becomes a queue of unanswered requests or disappears altogether.

This guide is for maintenance administrators, operations managers and facilities teams in Portugal who need a clear approval process. It covers approval tiers, the safety and contractor checks that sit behind them, and how to run the whole thing in software rather than in email chains. A note on terminology: here we mean maintenance work orders, not the honorary orders of the Portuguese state or the professional bodies (ordens profissionais), which follow entirely different procedures.

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TL;DR

Approve by tier: routine preventive tasks need little or no prior sign-off, while new components, design changes or high-cost jobs need formal approval before work starts.
Treat approval as assurance, not paperwork: it confirms that each intervention supports the value and reliability of the asset.
In Portugal, the owner of the installation remains responsible for safety, so contractor qualifications and safety plans must be checked before a work order is released.
Define who can request, approve and close an order, and give each role only the permissions it needs.
A digital workflow with roles, time stamps and an audit trail replaces chasing approvals by phone and email.

Índice

What work order approval actually decides
Approval tiers: who signs what
Safety and contractor checks before release
Designing the workflow step by step
Common mistakes and how to avoid them
Roles and permissions
Perspective: what we see in approval workflows
Running approvals in software
Measuring whether your approvals work
FAQ
Fontes

What work order approval actually decides

A work order approval answers four questions in sequence:

Is the work necessary? Does the request match a real fault, a scheduled preventive task or a compliance requirement?
Is the cost within authority? Who is allowed to commit this amount of labour, parts and downtime?
Is it safe to execute? Are the technicians qualified, the procedures in place and the area prepared?
Is the timing right? Can the asset be taken out of service now, or does the job need to wait for a window?

If your current process only answers the first question, approvals are a formality. If it answers all four, they are a control point that managers can rely on.

Approval as assurance

The ISO committee guidance on the revision of ISO 55001 describes asset management as strategic as well as technical. In practice, aligning the asset management system with the organisation’s risk objectives is what makes approval useful. An approval step that checks whether an intervention contributes to the longevity and value of the asset is doing more than ticking a box. This is also the reason a request that merely repeats a recurring fault, without anyone investigating the root cause, deserves a question before it receives a signature.

Approval tiers: who signs what

Not every work order needs the same scrutiny. Requiring a director to approve a filter change is as damaging as letting a technician replace a major component without a second opinion. The practical answer is a tiered structure, often called levels of authority (alçadas) in Portuguese organisations.

In service contracts for buildings and industrial assets, this structure is common. Public procurement records published on BASE, the Portuguese public contracts portal, show the logic: work that involves new components or design changes typically needs prior formal approval from the contracting party (the client), while routine preventive or corrective maintenance at no additional cost may only need to be reported after execution, depending on the specification in each contract. Your own contracts and internal rules will define the exact thresholds, so treat the table below as a starting point.

Tier	Typical work	Who approves	Quando
1. Routine	Scheduled preventive tasks, inspections, standard checks	Pre-approved by the maintenance plan	Before the schedule is activated, not per order
2. Standard corrective	Repairs using stock parts, within a set cost limit	Maintenance supervisor	Before execution, within the shift
3. Significant	Higher cost, extended downtime, external contractors	Maintenance manager, and the client where a contract requires it	Before execution, with cost estimate attached
4. Change or critical	New components, design changes, work on critical or regulated assets	Manager plus client or technical authority	Formally and in writing, before any work
5. Emergency	Immediate safety risk or production stoppage	On-call authority, with retrospective review	Execute first, document and review within a set time

Two details make this table work. First, tier 1 approval happens once, at the level of the preventive maintenance plan, which keeps hundreds of recurring orders from piling up in an approver’s inbox. Second, tier 5 needs a fixed rule for retrospective review, otherwise “emergency” becomes the route around every control.

Setting cost and risk thresholds

Choose thresholds from your own data rather than from a generic benchmark. Look at the last 12 months of orders and sort them by cost and by asset criticality. Most organisations find that a small share of orders carries most of the spend and most of the risk. Place the approval thresholds so that those orders reach a manager, while the large volume of low-value work flows through a supervisor. Review the thresholds every year, or after any change in contracts or asset base.

Safety and contractor checks before release

In Portugal, approval is not only a financial control. It is the point where you confirm that the work can be carried out safely and legally.

The Portuguese government’s guide to occupational safety and health, which draws on the guidance of the Authority for Working Conditions (ACT), makes clear where responsibility sits. As summarised on gov.pt, the owner of the installation is responsible for making sure that everyone who intervenes, including external maintenance technicians, has the necessary qualifications and approved safety plans before starting. The most common mistake is to hand risky tasks to a subcontractor without first checking its formal authorisation.

Turn that into approval checks that appear on every order above tier 2:

Contractor identity and authorisation: is the company allowed to carry out this kind of work?
Technician qualifications: do they match the task and the asset?
Safety plan: has a safety and health plan (PSS) been submitted and accepted where required?
Work equipment: does the equipment to be used meet the minimum safety requirements of Decree-Law 50/2005, which covers the use of work equipment?
Area preparation: is isolation, access and notification of affected staff arranged?

Lead times on large sites

On large sites such as university campuses or critical buildings, it is common practice for the maintenance manager to require safety documentation in advance, often around two working days before the team enters. Without this safety approval, the work order is not validated for execution. If your site works this way, build the lead time into the order: the approval date and the earliest start date should be separate fields, so planners do not promise a job that cannot legally begin.

Regulated installations

Some assets sit under specific regulatory regimes. For electrical installations and gas networks, the DGEG explains that licensed installing entities (types A, B or A+B) are the only ones authorised to carry out or maintain these installations, under the safety rules in force since Law 15/2015. For a work order on a gas network, the approver should therefore verify the contractor’s status before releasing the job. The same page notes that a gas installing entity’s authorisation, issued under that law, is valid indefinitely as long as the original conditions are maintained. The practical consequence is that you should record the installer’s authorisation reference on the order and re-check it if their circumstances change.

These rules change, and each asset type has its own requirements. For anything involving a licence, confirm the current position with the DGEG or ACT, or with your safety and health technician, before you write it into procedure.

Designing the workflow step by step

A workable approval workflow has five stages. We describe a broader view in our five-stage work order workflow; here the focus is on the approval gate in the middle.

Request. An operator, technician or tenant raises the request with the asset, the symptom, the location, a photo if possible and a suggested priority.
Triage. A supervisor checks completeness, merges duplicates and sets the priority. Incomplete requests go back to the requester with a reason.
Approval. The right approver, according to the tier, reviews cost, risk, contractor status and timing. The outcome is one of three: approve, reject with reason, or return for more information.
Execution. The technician receives the approved order, records time, parts used and findings, and flags anything that exceeds the approved scope.
Close-out. A reviewer confirms completion, checks the record and closes the order. Data flows into reporting and asset history.

O work order management process to reduce downtime goes deeper on how each stage affects response times.

Handling scope changes

The most frequent approval failure happens after approval: the technician opens the equipment and finds more work than expected. Decide in advance how much variance is tolerated, for example a percentage of the approved cost or an extra hour of labour. Anything above it returns to the approver as a variation request before the work continues. This keeps the approved value and the actual value comparable, which in turn keeps your analytics honest.

Service level for approvals

An approval step with no time limit is a bottleneck. Set a response time for each tier, and define what happens when the approver does not reply: escalate to a deputy, not to silence. Many teams also nominate a delegate for holidays and sickness so that critical orders never wait for one person.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

One approval level for everything. It either overloads managers or lets expensive jobs through unchecked. Use tiers.
Approvals by email or message. There is no consistent record, and during an audit you have to reconstruct who agreed to what. Keep approval inside the order.
No rejection reasons. Requesters learn nothing, and the same poor requests return. Make a reason mandatory.
Skipping contractor validation under time pressure. This is the error that carries legal exposure for the installation owner. Make the contractor check a condition for release, not a recommendation.
Emergency work that is never reviewed. Schedule a review of emergency orders every week or month, and look for patterns that suggest a preventive task is missing.
Approvers without context. An approver who sees only a description cannot judge risk. Show asset history, previous orders, criticality and stock availability on the same screen.

The quality of the preventive programme also affects how many approvals you need in the first place. Our guide to passos essenciais de manutenção preventiva explains how a good plan moves work from tier 4 or 5 into tier 1. For a different angle on keeping maintenance visible, this piece on tracking building maintenance cleaning tasks shows how task tracking supports the upkeep of building assets.

Roles and permissions

A clean approval process depends on clear roles. A typical set looks like this:

Função	Can do	Cannot do
Requester	Raise and follow requests	Approve or edit costs
Técnico	Execute, record time and parts, flag scope changes	Approve own orders
Supervisor	Triage, approve tier 2, assign work	Approve above own limit
Gestor	Approve tiers 3 and 4, review emergencies, close orders	Alter closed records without trace
Administrador	Configure roles, thresholds and integrations	Approve orders on behalf of others without logging

The principle of separation of duties matters here: the person who requests or executes a job should not be the one who approves it. In small teams, where this is hard, compensate with a periodic review by someone outside the chain.

Perspective: what we see in approval workflows

At Fullyops, we build for maintenance and facilities teams, and the approval step is where we most often see good intentions fail. Teams usually have rules, but the rules live in people’s heads or in scattered messages, so approvals depend on who happens to be available. Our view is that approval should be a defined, visible stage inside the work order itself, tied to roles and permissions, with the asset history in front of the approver.

We also believe the approval should be proportionate. A platform that brings asset lifecycle, work orders, analytics and field data into one place lets an approver judge a request on facts: how often this asset has failed, what the last intervention cost, which parts are in stock. That is faster and fairer than approving on instinct, and it leaves a record that an auditor or a client can follow. The goal is not more control for its own sake, but fewer surprises.

— Pedro

Running approvals in software

A spreadsheet can hold a list of orders, but it cannot enforce who approves what, notify the next person, or keep a trustworthy history. Software closes those gaps. When you assess a platform, check that it supports:

configurable roles and permissions for requesters, technicians, supervisors and managers;
a visible status on every order, so nobody has to ask where it is;
asset history and inventory availability within the order;
reporting on approval times, rejection rates and cost against approved value;
integrations with the systems you already use, such as purchasing or ERP.

Fullyops is a cloud platform that brings together work order management, preventive maintenance scheduling, technician workflows, inventory tracking, reporting, user roles and permissions, and integrations with other systems. It is offered in Basic, Professional and Advanced plans, with different levels of functionality for technicians, administrators and managers. To see how your own approval tiers would look in practice, explore the plans on our site and request a demo. If you want to start with the fundamentals, our guides to ordens de serviço digitais e work order templates are a practical first step.

Measuring whether your approvals work

Once the process is running, track a handful of indicators and review them monthly:

Time to approve by tier, to find bottlenecks.
Rejection and return rate, which shows the quality of requests.
Variance between approved and actual cost, which shows the quality of estimates and scope control.
Share of emergency orders, which signals whether preventive work is sufficient.
Orders released without a completed contractor check, which should be zero.

If these numbers are visible in your reporting, approval becomes a way of improving the maintenance programme rather than a hurdle. Our guides to equipment performance analysis e análise de dados em manutenção show how to turn these figures into decisions.

FAQ

Does every work order need formal approval?

No. Routine preventive tasks can be approved once, at the level of the maintenance plan, and individual orders then proceed automatically. Formal approval before execution is usually reserved for work involving higher cost, external contractors, new components or design changes. Your contracts and internal rules set the exact limits.

Who is responsible for safety when a contractor does the work?

In Portugal, the owner of the installation remains responsible for checking that everyone intervening has the right qualifications and approved safety plans, as the government’s safety and health guide explains. Hiring a contractor does not transfer that duty. For specific cases, ask your safety and health technician or the ACT.

How should emergency work be approved?

Let an on-call authority approve it verbally or through a quick digital step so the repair is not delayed, then document the order immediately afterwards. Review every emergency order within a fixed period, so that the exception does not become a habit and recurring failures lead to preventive tasks.

What should an approver see before saying yes?

The asset, its criticality and history, the cost estimate, the contractor’s authorisation status, any required safety plan, stock availability and the proposed date. If the approver has to ask for any of these, the order template needs improving.