The Work Orders board

When you open Work Orders, you land on the board — a simple, at-a-glance view of everything in the shop right now. It shows your repairs, custom jobs, and in-house production pieces together in one place, so you don’t have to dig through three separate lists to see what’s on the bench.

Board, Bench, or List

A toggle in the top-right corner switches between three views, and JewelTrak remembers which one you last used:

• Board (the everyday view) — jobs grouped into lanes by where they are in the workflow. Best for “what’s the shop status right now?”
• Bench — the same active jobs grouped by assigned bench jeweler instead of status. Best for “who’s working on what, and who’s overloaded?” (see below).
• List — the full, searchable table. Best for finding a specific job, filtering, or reviewing everything including completed work.

The lanes

The board has three active lanes:

• In Shop — received and waiting to be worked (includes jobs needing a quote or waiting on a vendor).
• In Progress — actively being worked.
• Ready for Pickup — finished and waiting for the customer.

Picked-up and closed jobs drop off the board entirely — find them in List view.

Within each lane, rush jobs come first, then the rest newest-first, and on-hold jobs sink to the bottom (dimmed) — so a paused job stays right where you’d look for it instead of disappearing.

Reading a job card

Each card is built to tell you what you need without opening it:

• Customer and item — who it’s for and what the piece is.
• RUSH toggle — tap the ⚡ Rush chip on any card to flag (or un-flag) it as urgent — no need to open the job. A rush job turns red and jumps to the top of its lane right away. This is the fast path for the “customer just called, can it be ready sooner?” moment.
• HOLD toggle — the mirror of Rush: tap the Hold chip to pause a job (waiting on the customer, a part, an approval). It dims and sinks to the bottom of its lane with an “On hold” badge — parked but still visible, not hidden away. Tap again to bring it back. (You can also flip both from the job’s Details.)
• Who has it now — the job’s current stage, shown as a colored chip: Stage · @ Vendor (e.g. Setting · @ Acme) — indigo when it’s at your bench, violet when it’s out at a vendor. It reads from the active stage — the first one not yet returned or skipped — so it’s always current even as you add or drop steps mid-job. If nothing is out, it shows a simple location like “At our bench.”
• Due back — the active stage’s expected return date, or the job’s Promised Date if nothing is out. It turns red and shows “overdue” when the date has passed — a second priority cue alongside Rush.
• Days in stage — how long the job has sat in its current lane (e.g. 3d). It turns amber, then red with a dot, once a job sits longer than expected for that status — your “this is going stale” nudge. A running 🔔 N stale count also appears in the toolbar whenever any job has gone stale — click it to filter the board to just those jobs, click again to clear.

The little Repair / Custom tag only appears in the “All Jobs” view; once you filter to one type it’s hidden as redundant.

Moving a job through the lanes

Drag a card from one lane to the next to advance it — the job’s status updates the moment you drop it. Drag freely among the three active lanes (In Shop → In Progress → Ready for Pickup), in either direction.

A couple of moves stay on the detail page on purpose:

• Picked Up is a checkout, not a status nudge — it collects the balance and consumes any parts — so you mark it from the job itself (where the money lives), not by dragging.
• Cancelled needs a reason, so it’s handled on the job too.

Dropping a job into Ready for Pickup pops a quick “notify the customer?” prompt — open the job to send the message (email now; text once carrier registration is live), or skip it. Marking a job ready still auto-creates its invoice (with any deposit applied), exactly as before.

You can still change status the classic way — open the job and pick a status from the detail page; it moves to the matching lane automatically.

The Bench board — workload by bench jeweler

Switch to the Bench view (the people icon in the top-right toggle) to see the shop a different way: one lane per bench jeweler, plus an Unassigned lane for work nobody’s picked up yet. It answers “who’s doing what, and who has too much on their plate?”

• Each lane header shows the load — the number of jobs and the total estimated hours assigned to that bench jeweler. A bench jeweler stacking up hours is easy to spot at a glance, so you can spread the work.
• Assign a job — drag a card onto a bench jeweler’s lane, or use the dropdown at the bottom of each card (handy on a tablet). Drag it to Unassigned to take it off someone’s plate.
• Prioritize within a lane — drag a card above or below another in the same bench jeweler’s lane to set the order they should work it. Rush jobs and the closest promised dates still float toward the top until you set an order by hand.

Set a job’s assigned bench jeweler and estimated hours on the work order itself — open it and look under Details → Salesperson & Bench. Estimated hours is what feeds each bench jeweler’s load total; a job with no estimate just doesn’t add to the hours tally.

The Bench board shows the same active jobs as the status board (nothing picked up or closed), and assigning or reordering here doesn’t change a job’s status — the two boards are two lenses on the same work.

For how each job type works under the board, see Repairs, Custom Jobs, and Production.