Your menu, your suppliers and your checklists

Three of the lists a shop keeps rather than works — the service menu, the supplier book and the inspection checklists — each grew the column people were actually scanning for. They share the paging and sorting rules every other list uses; what follows is only what is particular to each.

The service menu and its groups

Canned services has a pane down the left listing All with the number on the menu, then one row per group with its own count. The header says the same two figures — how many services, and how many groups, or which group you are in.

A group is an exact match and the filter box beside it is a substring, and the two are deliberately different questions. Typing brakes into the filter finds a brake fluid flush; choosing a group shows the services stamped with that name and no others, or the count beside it would be wrong.

The pane always lists every group, including the ones you are not in, so choosing a group is never a door you cannot walk back through. If a URL names a group nothing carries, the page says so rather than pretending you have no services.

Each service card carries two facts in its corner: how many lines the recipe holds, counting labour and parts together, and what it comes to. The total is written at today's rate with an approximately-equal sign in front of it, and both are meant.

The reason is that a recipe stores hours, never a rate. When you apply it to a ticket, each labour line is priced from that ticket's customer, vehicle and job, so a fleet account or a labour matrix lands on a different figure — correctly. The two agree to the cent whenever the ticket resolves to the shop's default rate, which is the ordinary case.

The menu also has Import and Export XLSX links, pointing at the same spreadsheet engine the parts shelf and the customer list use rather than a second one written for this screen.

The supplier book

Parts › Vendors now shows Name, Phone, Email and Account # as columns of their own. All four are edited where they sit, and one Save at the end of the row posts them together.

The search box above the table looks in all four at once — the name, the account number the rep asks for, the phone and the email — because a supplier is looked up off whatever is in your hand. The address is not one of them: you cannot find a vendor by their street. Notes are not searched either: they are your private remarks about a supplier, and a row surfacing because of a substring inside one is a surprise rather than a result.

Both figures in the header count inside the current search, so the page never tells you there is one vendor and forty-one active. The search is an ordinary link, so the result is an address you can bookmark, and the sort you chose rides along with it.

The sortable headings are unchanged — the vendor, what it supplies, its open purchase orders and its status. The four contact columns are typed into rather than sorted by.

Inspection checklists

Each template at Settings › Inspection templates carries its version, how many items are on it, and two dates that are not the same date. Current version saved is when somebody last edited the checklist. Created is when the checklist was first written, to the day, with who wrote it.

On a template edited eleven times those two can be years apart, which is why both are printed with the word saying which is which. One alone would either make a live checklist look stale or hide its age.

Retired templates carry the same two dates and an item count, so you can see how big one is before deciding whether to restore it rather than having to open it.