Write the work order and turn on block from booking. While it is open, new reservations skip that site, and closing the job puts it back on sale. RV park work order software that only records the repair leaves the site selling itself while it is out of service.
The spigot at site 18 is leaking at the riser. Somebody noticed at 9:40 this morning. There is an arrival on that site at 2:30 this afternoon, and a second one on Thursday that was made online last night while everyone was asleep.
That second booking is the real problem. The leak is a plumbing job and plumbing jobs get done. A booking landing on a site you already know is out of service is a phone call you have to make, a guest you have to move, and a story that starts with our system did not know.
Why put the booking block on the work order?
Most maintenance software will let you write the job down and assign it. That part is easy and it is not where the money is. The useful bit is a switch on the work order that takes the site off the booking page while it is open, and puts it back when you close it.
You are already making that decision in your head every time something breaks: is this a today problem or a two week problem, and do I keep selling the site. Putting the switch on the job means the decision gets recorded next to the reason for it.
Who can a campground work order go to?
Some jobs go to Marcus. Some go to whoever is on maintenance that day. Some go to a company you call twice a summer and cannot remember whether you added last time. All three should be an assignment, and the third one should not send you off to a vendor screen and lose the form you were writing.
Add the vendor from inside the work order, assign it to them, keep going. That sounds like a small thing. It is the difference between a vendor list that reflects who actually works on your park and one that has four entries in it from 2024.
Where does the repair cost end up?
Parts and photos ride on the job. When you close it, the $42 in fittings posts to maintenance in your accounting, against site 18. At the end of the season you can see which sites ate your summer, which is a different and more useful question than how much you spent on plumbing.
A repair nobody wrote down looks free. It comes back as a slow month and a guest who does not rebook, and neither of those has the spigot's name on it.
What about the guest already booked on it?
Blocking stops new bookings. It does not touch the reservations already there, because deciding what happens to a paid guest is not something software should do at 9:40 on a Tuesday. What it can do is put those reservations in front of you, on the arrivals list, so you move them on purpose in the morning rather than at 2:30 with the family standing at the office.
The jobs you write every season, the ones that come with the same parts and the same vendor, can sit as templates or repeat on their own. Which is the next article.