Services

The Work Orders board

Work Orders opens as a simple board — three lanes (In Shop, In Progress, Ready for Pickup) showing every repair, custom job, and production piece at a glance. Drag a card to the next lane to advance it, tap the Rush chip to prioritize, Group by Who has it to balance work across vendors and bench jewelers or by Salesperson to see follow-ups, or List view when you need to search.

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 or List, and Group by

A toggle in the top-right corner switches between the Board and the List. On the board, Group by slices the same active jobs three ways. JewelTrak remembers your choices.

Stage (the everyday view): lanes by where each job is in the workflow. Best for “what’s the shop status right now?”
Who has it: one lane per vendor and bench jeweler holding work. Best for “is one vendor getting too many jobs?” (see below).
Salesperson: one lane per person who took the job in. Best for “who has follow-ups to make?” (see below).
List: the full, searchable table. Best for finding a specific job, filtering, or reviewing completed work. It shows open jobs until you pick another status.

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. The list opens on Open jobs; click Picked Up or All Status to see finished work, including when you search for an old job.

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.

Status follows the steps

You don’t have to move a job to In Progress yourself. The moment one of its steps is under way (sent to a vendor or at the bench), a job that says Received or Approved moves to In Progress on its own. If you reopen a step on a job that was Ready for Pickup (Mark unfinished), it goes back to In Progress, because the piece isn’t finished after all. Each automatic change is noted in the job’s history.

Finishing stays your call. When every step is done, the job page shows All steps are done with one button: Ready for pickup + notify for a customer’s piece, or Finished — in stock for one of your own. It isn’t automatic because marking a job ready can message the customer, and finishing an in-house piece creates and prices its stock item.

Group by: Who has it (vendor workload)

One lane per vendor and per bench jeweler holding work, plus Unassigned for jobs whose current step names nobody (and jobs with no steps yet). It answers “is one vendor getting too many jobs while another sits idle?”

Each card is a step, not a whole job. Now is the step being worked; Next (lighter, dashed) is a step queued for that vendor or jeweler, so you can see what’s coming before it ships. A job with steps at two vendors appears in both lanes.
Each lane header reads like 3 now · 2 next · 1 late · oldest due Aug 31. Late means a current step’s due-back date has passed.
Reassign by dragging a card to another lane, or tap Move… on the card (on an iPad, where there’s no dragging) and pick anyone from the full list; type any part of a name. To give a step to someone without a lane, drop it on Drop here to give it to someone else… and pick them from the list.
A step already out at a vendor asks first: moving it records it as sent today to the new vendor. The step’s cost stays as entered; update it on the job if the new vendor charges differently.

Empty lanes are only for people who have done work before. A vendor or bench jeweler who has held a step on any past job keeps a lane (“Nothing assigned”) even when idle, so you can drag work to them. Staff who have never held a step (most salespeople) get no lane.

Hide a lane you don’t need — a one-off vendor, say — with the × in its header. Only empty lanes can be hidden, and a hidden lane comes back on its own the moment that person holds a step again. Show N hidden columns (under the “someone else” drop) brings them all back. Hiding is remembered on this device only.

Group by: Salesperson

One lane per person who took the job in (the job’s Salesperson). Each header reads like 12 jobs · 2 late · 4 ready, and ready is the list of customers to call. A card marked Ready — call the customer is finished and waiting.

Reassign by dragging a card to another salesperson, or use the picker at the bottom of each card. It changes who the job belongs to, never its status.

Estimated hours still come from the job’s steps (put hours against the steps in Job progress; the job’s total is their sum), and the job’s Details field displays that total.

Every grouping shows the same active jobs (nothing picked up or closed), and reassigning never changes a job’s status: the groupings are lenses on the same work.

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