Holding a service back from the customer

On any service card in the Services tab of a ticket there is a small eye icon. Press 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. The eye is struck through while the service is held back, so the glyph is also the answer to whether it is.

Do not reach for the box in the same row. That one is a picture of parts on order and it is not a control at all — pressing it does nothing, by design. The 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 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 R button beside it does something else entirely. 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.

Two notes, and only one of them travels

Add note on a card 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.

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.