One code for life

20 September 2026. The fourth release of the 1.0 programme makes Service Centre a product of its own and gives the whole platform one traceability code. An item arrives, is identified, is measured, is worked on at several benches, is priced on what was found rather than what was declared, is packed and goes back, and every one of those moves is recorded, because the customer paid for a promise about their own property.

One code, and the record behind it

• Every item, batch, package, job, delivery and stock lot takes one code that is scannable two ways: a QR a phone reads and a Code 128 line a wedge scanner reads, both landing in the same place. Every serial you have already printed keeps working for life.
• A code holds any number of outside references, so a scan of the customer's own asset number, a brand's factory code or a courier's tracking number finds your item.
• The record behind a code is added to and never edited: who touched it, where, on what and when, with the minutes between each move read from the scans rather than estimated. A status can no longer move without its record, and a record cannot exist without the move.
• Scan a label with no sign in and see exactly what you choose to show: nothing at all, the item and where it is, or the dates it moved. Nothing else, ever.

The workshop

• Servicing has five views. Work ranks what needs doing and shows the jobs in progress and the queue at every station in minutes. Registry is every item you hold. Services are your service models. Rules are every setting the workshop has, in one place. Costing is your rates, your standard minutes and six reports.
• A service model declares the kind of work it is, the families of item it applies to, the benches it runs through, the minutes each should take and the rules it quotes under. Ten are ready for common trades and any of them is yours to change.
• A family is a class of item with its own fields: what the tool is, entered once, and what is measured every service. The inspector's form asks for those, with the customer's own limits shown as bounds the field will not cross.
• Rules decide what is asked, surcharged, refused or defaulted before anyone types anything, and a rule that changed a line says so on the line, in words.

The floor

• A bench, a machine, a dock or a van signs in with its own device key and reaches one screen. A station is not a person: it records the work and never sees a price.
• The scan screen works on a phone at the bench, on a tablet on a stand, with a camera or with any keyboard wedge scanner.
• It also works with no signal. Scans are kept on the device with the time they were actually taken, and when the signal comes back they arrive in the order they were taken, carrying that time and not the time they were sent.
• Print a label in either of two sizes, a docket, a batch sheet or a packing list.

What the work costs

• Set your rates once, per workspace, per centre or per station, each with the dates it applied from. Set the minutes a step should take. Every scan is then priced from them.
• The minutes between two scans are what the work actually took, so standard against actual is a column on every step, service, family, centre, customer and month, with the margin against the price beside it.
• A cost with nothing behind it is never invented: the figure says what is missing instead.

What your customer sees

• With Commerce on, a customer signs in and sees their own items, where each one is, what was done, what is due back and the answers they have given, and can ask for a collection in one tap.
• They never see your minutes, your operators or your costs.