Rentvine work orders: what the settings automate, and what they leave to you

Rentvine treats the work order as the center of maintenance. Tenants submit requests in their portal, your team assigns the job to a vendor or to one of your own technicians, and each of them works it in a portal of their own. Several settings decide what happens automatically along the way. The calls and texts between those steps are still yours.

This post follows a work order through Rentvine using its help center and public pages, then names where a job waits on a person. It describes Rentvine as its public pages do, checked on the date in the sources.

From the tenant portal to the vendor’s close in Rentvine

1. The tenant submits a request. It arrives as a work order. A setting can assign it automatically to the lease assignee on your team, who is then notified whenever its status changes.
2. It goes to a technician or a vendor. With Internal Maintenance, you assign work orders to your in-house technicians, who see only the jobs assigned to them in a technician portal. Vendors see every work order they have for your company in the vendor portal and are notified when a new one arrives.
3. Estimates and limits. Vendors are notified when you need an estimate and can upload it in the portal. A setting can show the property’s maintenance limit on the work order PDF and in the vendor portal.
4. The work happens. Technicians log labor by start and stop time or total hours, add materials from a price book, upload photos and mark the work complete.
5. The vendor closes it. A setting can move the work order to a status you choose when the vendor closes it in the portal, and another lets vendors upload an invoice to the completed work order.
6. The tenant reviews the vendor. With vendor reviews turned on, the tenant gets an email asking them to review the vendor who completed the work.

When nothing changes, nobody is notified

Rentvine’s notifications tell people that something changed. They don’t decide what happens when nothing changes.

A vendor closing a work order and the tenant’s hot water coming back are two different events. The vendor review email reaches the tenant after the close, and it asks about the vendor, not whether the problem is gone.

A checklist for Rentvine users

• Turn on the setting that moves a work order to a status you choose when a vendor closes it, so closed jobs are easy to find and check
• Show the maintenance limit on the work order, so vendors know when to ask before they spend
• Put your technicians in Internal Maintenance and decide which trades they take before a vendor does
• Ask the tenant whether it is fixed before the work order is final, and note the answer on it
• Set a time limit for a vendor to reply, and name the backup vendor for each trade

Our posts on in-house technicians or vendors and confirming a repair before closing the work order go further on the last three.

Where Now Ours fits

Connected to Rentvine, now ours reads your work orders and writes each step back, and work orders close in Rentvine. It acts on the silence the settings can’t see: when a vendor hasn’t replied, Ours texts them up to 4 times in your company’s name before the case comes to you with the next step first. It offers each job to your Internal Maintenance technicians first and then your vendors, and answers tenant calls and texts at any hour. When someone on your team changes the work order in Rentvine, it pauses its plan for that case. The work order closes only when the tenant confirms the fix, or the vendor or technician marks it done with a photo or note. See how now ours works with Rentvine.