Manager basics
Knurl is built so technicians spend almost all their time in the mobile app, and managers spend almost all their time in the dashboard. This page is your operating manual for the dashboard side.
The five things you'll do most
- Triage reported issues — move them from Reported to Open, set priority.
- Assign work — pick a technician.
- Review completed work — approve or reject from photo proof.
- Schedule preventive maintenance — once per asset, then it runs itself.
- Read reports — what's open, what's overdue, who's the bottleneck.
Users and roles
Knurl has four built-in roles. The role decides what someone can do:
- Owner — full control, including billing. One per facility. Created when the facility is set up.
- Admin — everything except billing. Manages users, roles, settings, integrations.
- Manager— triage, assign, approve, schedule PM, run reports. Can't add or remove users.
- Technician — mobile app only. Sees assets and their assigned work. Reports issues. Updates and completes work with photo proof.
On Enterprise plans you can define custom rolesthat widen what a builtin role can do — never narrow. The builtin role is always the floor.
Asset hierarchy
Assets can sit on their own or under a location. Locations are a tree (Building → Floor → Room → Sub-area), up to 5 levels deep. Skip locations for the first 20 assets; revisit when you outgrow a flat list.
Work order priorities
Priority drives the SLA timer (visible on Operations plans and up). The defaults:
- Critical — 4 hours.
- High — 24 hours.
- Normal — 3 days.
- Low — 14 days.
At 75% of the budget the work order turns amber on the triage board; at 100% it's red. The mobile app shows the same timer to the assignee.
Preventive maintenance
Go to Maintenance → Add schedule. Pick an asset, a frequency (every N days, or every N meter units), the priority level, and an assignee (or leave it on “auto-assign to least-busy” if you have many technicians).
Knurl runs a sweep every 15 minutes. When a PM comes due, a work order is generated and dropped into your triage queue in the right state. You don't need to remember anything.
Checklists
Attach a checklist to a PM schedule and the technician sees the checklist on the work order in the mobile app. They tick items as they go. Required items must be ticked before they can mark the work complete.
Parts inventory
On Team plans and up. Track quantity-on-hand, set reorder points, attach parts to vendors. When a technician consumes a part during a work order, the inventory drops automatically. Receipts via Purchase Orders add back to inventory.
Reports
On Operations plans and up. The Analytics page projects over the work-order event log — so the numbers are always consistent with the audit trail. Common reports:
- MTTR — mean time to repair, by month.
- Throughput — closed work orders per week.
- Backlog age — how long the oldest open work order has been waiting.
- By assignee — who is the throughput leader, who is the bottleneck.
- By priority — are SLA timers being met.
- Reassignment rate — how often a work order is bounced between technicians (high = a process problem).
Every report has a CSV export.
Exporting data
Two paths:
- Per-report CSV from each analytics page.
- Full facility ZIP from Settings → Export all data. Includes every entity (assets, work orders, work-order events, photos metadata, users, audit log). Available on every plan, including read-only after a lapse.
Your data is yours. There is no “contact us to export” gate.
Reviewing photo proof
When a technician marks work complete, it lands in Pending review with their photos and notes attached. Open the work order drawer, scroll through the photos (tap to enlarge), read the notes. Then:
- Approve — the work order moves to Completed. Done.
- Reject — the work order goes back to In progress with your comment. The technician sees the reason in the mobile app.
Approving or closing work orders
Approval is required for every completion. Closing — moving fromCompleted to Closed — is mostly automatic (work orders auto-close after N days; configurable per facility). You can also close manually from the drawer.
Where to learn the rest
- Quick start— if you're new, do this first.
- Work order state machine — every event a work order can go through.
- What happens when a subscription lapses.
- Security & data.