Most portfolios run 60 work order categories and need about 15

Open the category list in almost any property management system and you will find something between 40 and 80 entries, added over a decade by whoever needed one that afternoon.

Somewhere in there are "Plumbing," "Plumbing - Other," "Toilet," "Toilet Running," and "Bathroom." A leasing agent taking a resident call picks one of those five essentially at random, and every report built on the field inherits the randomness.

A category earns its place by changing a decision

The test is narrow and it eliminates most of the list.

A category is justified if knowing it changes who gets dispatched, what part they bring, or how fast they go. If it changes none of those, it is a label, and labels accumulate without limit because nobody ever argues against adding one.

Run that test against "Plumbing - Other." It tells the dispatcher nothing, tells the tech nothing about parts, and sets no urgency. It exists because someone had a plumbing issue that did not fit and the system let them add an option rather than pick the closest one.

Now run it against "Toilet - running." Different tech skill from a sewer backup, different part on the truck, different urgency. That one earns its place.

Fifteen categories cover almost everything

A list that works, and the reasoning is that each one maps to a distinct skill or part set:

HVAC - no cooling. HVAC - no heat. HVAC - other. Plumbing - leak. Plumbing - drain or backup. Plumbing - toilet. Plumbing - fixture. Electrical - outlet or switch. Electrical - lighting. Appliance - refrigerator. Appliance - range or oven. Appliance - dishwasher or disposal. Appliance - washer or dryer. Doors, locks, and keys. General repair.

Then a small set outside the resident-request flow: make-ready, preventative maintenance, grounds and common area, and high-risk.

That is nineteen including the operational ones, and it will classify well over 90% of intake without anybody guessing.

Splitting HVAC into no-cooling and no-heat looks fussy and is the single highest-value split on the list, because those two are seasonal, they carry different urgency thresholds, and they are the largest cost category in most portfolios.

Priority needs four levels and a written definition for each

Priority lists suffer the opposite problem. Where categories proliferate, priority collapses, because everything becomes urgent when urgency is undefined.

Emergency. Active water, no heat or cooling at outside temperature extremes, gas, electrical hazard, security failure, or the unit is uninhabitable tonight. Dispatch now, including after hours. This is the same list the after-hours triage script uses, and it should be literally the same list rather than a parallel one.

Urgent. Habitable but degraded and it will get worse or generate a second call. A single-bathroom toilet that runs constantly, a refrigerator that is cold but not cold enough, a slow drain. Target 24 hours.

Standard. Everything a resident wants fixed that is not degrading. Target three business days.

Scheduled. Work with a date attached rather than a clock: preventative maintenance, make-ready stages, planned multi-visit work. Measuring these against a response-time target is what makes portfolio SLA numbers meaningless, because scheduled work sits open by design.

That fourth level is the one most systems lack, and its absence is why so many maintenance dashboards show aging that nobody can interpret.

The resident does not set priority and neither does the intake note

Worth stating because it is where most priority data goes wrong.

Priority set from a resident's description of urgency measures how upset the resident is. That is worth knowing and it is not the same thing as operational urgency.

Priority should be derived from category plus a small number of conditions. HVAC - no cooling in July is Emergency. The same category in October is Standard. Plumbing - leak is Urgent by default and Emergency if the intake question about active water is answered yes.

Derived priority is consistent across every person taking calls, and consistency is the whole reason the field is worth reporting on.

High-risk is a flag, not a priority

The categories that turn into claims need to be separable from the ones that are merely urgent, and priority cannot carry both meanings.

Water intrusion, pool, and life-safety work is high-risk because it requires documentation and review, regardless of how fast it needs doing. A water intrusion event is both Emergency priority and high-risk. A scheduled pool inspection is Scheduled priority and still high-risk.

Collapsing those two dimensions into one field is how a pool inspection ends up in a queue with a running toilet. GetDone treats high-risk as a separate workflow with gated checklists, required photos, and supervisor approval, which is what makes it possible for a low-urgency item to still be non-skippable.

Before that gating existed in our own portfolio, 116 high-risk orders sat open with 90 past two days, for the straightforward reason that they were indistinguishable from everything else in the queue.

Count your categories this week

Export the list. Count the active ones. Then count how many produced more than 20 work orders last year.

The gap between those two numbers is your cleanup, and it is usually most of the list.

How many did you have?