The work list and inspection

Services is one page, and what needs doing comes first: every open item ranked, each row carrying the one thing that moves it on, from booking in through inspection and approval to sending it back. Under it sits a status strip that filters, then the serialised item registry, then the services you offer.

How the ranking works

The rule is deliberately explicable rather than clever, because a workshop has to be able to argue with it. Three bands, in this order.

1. Past the date you promised it back.
2. Due within the next three days.
3. Everything else, longest waiting first.

Inside a band, the item whose next step is furthest from being done comes first, with finished but not yet sent back highest of all, because that is money on a shelf and a customer waiting on nothing. Every row says its own reason in words, so nothing is ranked by a number you cannot see.

A due date exists only where the service declared a turnaround or somebody set one by hand, so in a young workspace most items sit in the third band and rank on how long they have waited. That is the honest answer: without a promise there is nothing to be late for. See Building a service for where the turnaround is declared.

Why one list rather than a board

A board tells you where every item is and never once tells you which to pick up. That is fine when there are nine items and useless when there are ninety, and the decision it quietly leaves to you, which column to look at first, is the decision that decides whether anything goes back on time.

The status strip still gives you the board's answer when you want it: click a status to see only the items sitting at that stage. It filters the list rather than replacing it.

Provisional pricing

A service can be marked subject to inspection. Items quoted under such a service carry a provisional price until someone measures them. The inspector screen is form first: open an item, the service parameters are pre-filled from the quoted values, you correct them against the real item and recalculate.

The delta approval flow

When the service is subject to inspection and the recalculated price moves away from the quoted price by more than your organisation inspection delta, the item goes to awaiting approval rather than straight into service.

1. An approval email goes to the customer contact with a diff table showing old against new parameters and price.
2. The contact follows an approve or decline link on the quote portal page.
3. Approve moves the item to in service. Decline returns the item.

Within the threshold the recalculated price stands and the item proceeds without asking the customer. The threshold is the line between a routine correction and a change worth confirming. An item waiting on the customer keeps its place in the work list, where it reads as chase the approval rather than as work you have not started.

Reject and complete

Rejecting an item records a reason, such as cracked, undersize or not economical, with optional free text and a photo. The customer is notified and any existing quote line is voided or marked rejected. Completing an item increments its times serviced count, sets it to completed and then to returned once dispatched.

Choosing the delta

The inspection delta is one number in organisation settings and it decides how often you interrupt a customer. Set it low and every small correction becomes an email and a wait. Set it high and a genuine doubling of the price goes through without anybody outside your building agreeing to it.

The useful way to pick it is to ask what size of change a buyer would want to be asked about on a job of your typical value. For most regrind work that is a larger percentage than people first assume, because the absolute figures are small; for high-value repair work it is smaller.