An order is the record of one visit. It is created as an estimate, priced, authorized, worked, completed and billed — and through all of that it stays one row with one number. The workflow status is what moves it along, and a handful of things happen automatically as it moves.
The six statuses
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Estimate | Being written. Nothing has been sent. |
| Estimate sent | The customer has it and can respond from their portal. |
| Approved | Something on it was authorized, by the customer or by your team. |
| In progress | Work has started. The document is now a repair order. |
| Completed | Work is done, ready to bill. |
| Invoiced | The bill has been issued. |
You can set the status directly from Workflow status in the order sidebar, and the big button under it always offers the next step: Send estimate, then Start work, Mark completed, Send invoice.
Note
Only owners and managers can move an order to invoiced. For a mechanic the option is not in the list and the Send invoice button does not appear — everything up to completed is theirs to drive.
An order has to be ready before it can move
The next-action button is disabled until the order has a customer, a vehicle and at least one line item. Hover it and the tooltip names the one that is missing. Older orders you inherited are the usual culprit — an order sketched out as a phone note has no vehicle on it yet.
What each move changes
The status is not just a label. Four things ride on it:
The document changes name and prefix
Estimate, estimate sent and approved all print as an estimate; in progress prints as a repair order; completed and invoiced print as an invoice. The number itself never changes — order 1043 is
EST-1043, thenRO-1043, thenINV-1043.Stock is consumed at completed
Parts reserved against the order are converted from reserved to consumed the moment you mark it completed (or invoice it directly). Up to that point they are held, not spent.
Time entries freeze at invoiced
Every time entry on the order is locked against edits and deletes once the bill is out. A timer still running is locked too, but it can always be stopped — nobody gets stranded on the clock.
The priced contents freeze at invoiced
Services and line items can no longer be added, edited or removed. Shop-level pricing — your tax rate, shop fees, supplies percentage, labor matrices — still feeds the live PDF, but the work on the order is settled.
Warning
There is no un-invoice. Check the order before you send the bill; after that, corrections belong on the invoice and its payments, not on the order's lines.
Approved, and what stops being billable
Up to approved, the total is simply everything on the order. From approved onward the order prices only the work that was actually authorized: declined services drop out, and so does anything still sitting unauthorized.
That is deliberate — it means the total tracks the agreement, not the wish list. It is also the answer to the most common surprise on this page, which is an order whose total fell when you moved it to approved.
Note
Work you add after the customer approved is unauthorized until somebody authorizes it, so it does not reach the invoice on its own. It does count towards the change warning on the order — see estimates and authorization.
Telling the customer
Two customer emails are tied to the status, and they behave differently:
- Completed sends a "your vehicle is ready" email on its own. Nothing to configure.
- Every other status change sends nothing unless you have written and activated the order status changed template under Settings → Messaging. Without that template there is no email, so turning the feature on later can never retroactively surprise a customer with mail they did not expect.
The status-change email carries your own text at the top, with the order and its
new status underneath. Use {Status} in the template to drop the new status into
your sentence, alongside the usual {First Name}, {Vehicle}, {Order Number}
and {Shop Name}.
Messaging templates are a Growth feature. On Basic, completed still emails the customer — that one is not a template.
Note
Your own team is notified separately, through the in-app notification system and its per-user preferences. Customer email and staff notifications are independent — muting one does not mute the other.
The two views of the board
Workflow shows the same orders two ways, and the toggle is remembered in the URL so a board link opens on the board.
- Board — one lane per status: estimate, estimate sent, approved, in progress, completed. Each lane loads its own orders and pages independently, so a shop with three hundred estimates does not pay for them to open the screen. Cards are for reading and opening; you change a status on the order itself, not by dragging.
- List — a table of every active order with totals, due dates and payment terms, filtered by a tab strip: All, Estimate, Sent, Approved, In progress, Completed, Archived. Completed and invoiced share the Completed tab; the counts beside each tab are live.
How jobs leave the board
Two different things, easy to confuse:
- Fully paid orders file themselves. An invoiced order whose payments cover its total drops off the active list and appears under Archived, with no action from you. It is derived, not stamped — a refund or a reopened invoice brings it straight back. A zero-total invoice does not count as paid; there was never anything to collect.
- Archiving is manual and reversible. Use it for the estimate that went nowhere or the job that was cancelled. Archive and Restore live in the row menu in list view. They are hidden on an order that filed itself — there is nothing to restore.
Troubleshooting
"The order total dropped when I approved it." Approved orders bill only authorized work. Something on the order is declined or still unauthorized.
"I can't move this order forward." It is missing a customer, a vehicle or a line item. Hover the disabled button; the tooltip says which.
"The customer didn't get a status email." Only completed emails on its own. For anything else, write and activate the order status changed template under Settings → Messaging, and check the customer has an email address on file.
"I can't edit an invoiced order." That is the freeze. Correct the invoice or record a payment adjustment instead.
"A completed job vanished from the list." It was paid in full and filed itself. Look under the Archived tab.