Holding a service back from the customer

Keep a service on your ticket and off the customer's estimate — the shop total still carries it, their copy and its totals do not, and it cannot be invoiced until you show it.

For owner, manager, advisor · checked against the product on 2026-10-31

On any service card in the Services tab of a ticket, open the … at the end of a service's top line. In it is Hide from the customer's copy, marked with a struck-through eye. Choose it and it withholds that service from the customer's copy: their estimate, their invoice and the page they follow the car on do not name it, do not price it, and do not carry its photographs — and a photograph of it stops answering on the link it was on. The card on your screen keeps everything — the labour, the parts, the fees — and says Not on the customer's copy where you cannot miss it. While the service is held back the same choice reads Show on the customer's copy, which is also the way to put it back.

The choice under it, marked with a box, is Lump sum (below), and What the customer sees, further down the same menu, shows without leaving the order what the customer's copy will say about this service — and for a held-back one, that it says nothing. The struck-through eye is the only thing on the card that holds a service back.

Two numbers, and they are meant to disagree

This is the part worth reading twice. Your ticket total still includes a held-back service. The customer's estimate total does not, and neither does the running total on the page they follow the car on — that figure is the same arithmetic the estimate freezes, so the two never disagree. So a ticket that reads $330.00 can send an estimate for $300.00, and neither figure is wrong: one is what the car is worth to you, the other is what you are asking this person to approve.

The repair order you print for them leaves it off too: not its name, not its fee, and not its money in the total. The work order you print for the bench keeps it, because that one is your copy.

The same boundary holds on a fleet's status link. Each open order shows the customer's own total, never the shop-only cached total that still includes held-back work. When that link gathers orders from several locations, each promised time is printed in the timezone of the location doing that order.

Every other system we have seen hides the card and the cents together. That looks tidier and it costs you the only number that mattered — what the work on this car actually comes to. An advisor who has held three services back while they cost them out should still be able to read the real figure off the ticket.

Recommending, which is a different thing

The Recommend choice in the same menu, marked with a boxed R, does something else entirely. While the service is recommended it reads Stop recommending, and the card's name carries a Recommended badge. A recommended service is still on the customer's copy and still goes through the same approve-or-decline; it is simply labelled as an option rather than folded into the price you are asking them to say yes to. Use it for the work you would do next, not the work you are quoting today. The Comments & Recommendations panel at the top of the Services tab adds up what all of that advice is worth on its heading line.

Two notes, and only one of them travels

Add note, on the row of links at the top of a card beside Assign category, opens two boxes. The customer-facing one is printed on their estimate and their invoice under that service. The internal one is not — there is no field on any customer document it could land in. They are separate boxes rather than one box and a tick, because one box and a tick has exactly one failure mode and it is a technician's private sentence arriving on a customer's bill.

One price for a service, or its lines without their prices

Two switches decide how the customer's copy prices a service. Lump sum, the choice marked with a box in the card's … menu, shows the service as its name and one price, and lists none of its lines. Hide line item pricing, the choice under it, lists every line by name and prints no price beside any of them. The card says which is on, in a badge beside its title.

Neither one changes a cent. Every line stays in the service's price, the tax and the total, on the estimate, the invoice, the customer's page, the PDF and the printed repair order. Your own screens show every line and every figure either way. A document you have already sent keeps what it said when you sent it.

Shop supplies and EPA, on the service they belong to

+ Fee on this service adds shop supplies, EPA or hazmat as a percentage of that service's own labour, its parts, or both. Outside work is in none of those bases on purpose: taking a supplies percentage of a machine shop's invoice charges your customer for somebody else's rags.

The card shows the rate and what it was taken of beside the amount, and the customer's copy prints the fee by name. It is disclosed rather than absorbed into a subtotal nobody can take apart — including you, three months later, when somebody asks what the $12.00 was.

Where this stops

A held-back service cannot be invoiced

While a service is held back it is not available to any invoice, and the ticket will tell you there is nothing to bill rather than quietly billing it. That is deliberate: handing somebody an invoice for work no document they hold has ever named is the argument this whole feature exists to prevent. Show the service, send the estimate again, and bill what the customer can see. Once the rest of the order is invoiced, the Grand Total still prices the held-back service, and the bar says what was billed beside the word Invoiced; the breakdown names the difference as Held back · not billed, so its rows add up to the balance. When that bill is paid the pill reads Fully Paid, and Order Status says the held-back service is not billed — show it to bill it, or decline it, before the order can close.

All help categories Create a shop