Promised time, and how late risk is worked out

A promised time is the moment the car goes home — not the moment it arrives. It is optional everywhere, and an order without one says so rather than inventing a guess.

Setting one

Three places. When you book, Schedule › New appointment has a card called Promised back (optional) with a Date and a Time box; the promise then rides onto the repair order at check-in. On an order, the right-hand Promised time panel does the same: the panel is always open, and the boxes are behind + Promise a time, which reads Change the promised time… once there is one. The button inside reads Save promised time. And Schedule › Promised times lets you set or move any car in the shop from one list, where the same button reads Save promise.

Both boxes or neither. A date with no time is refused with A promised time needs both a date and a time — or leave both blank.

Moving one costs a sentence

The first promise on an order needs no explanation. Changing it does, and so does taking it off — the reason box relabels itself Why it's changing (required) the moment a promise exists. The reason is kept, with your name and the old time, in a history the product cannot rewrite. Ten seconds at the counter, and in three weeks you can answer "you told me Tuesday" with what actually happened.

Keep it under 300 characters. Re-saving the same time writes nothing — it is not a change.

The five words on the badge

late

The promised time has passed and the work is not finished.

at risk

Something specific is pressing against the promise. The headline says which one, in a sentence.

on track

Everything the product can check, it checked, and none of it is a problem.

unknown

It genuinely cannot tell. See below — this is the interesting one.

—

Nothing to forecast: a quote, a car that is ready, invoiced, paid or closed, a declined job, a no-show.

Six things can put a car at risk: an estimate still waiting on approval within two hours of the promise; nothing clocked to the job within four hours of it; the car waiting on something within eight hours of it — parts, approval or the customer, and the tooltip names which; more work left than there is shop time to do it in, with a quarter as much again for slack; an unfinished job that has already passed its labor estimate; or a promise that falls on a stretch the shop is not open for at all, which trips on its own the moment there is no working time left before it. The overrun check names the overrun instead of inventing a new estimate. The wait is written out in full — Waiting on parts, Waiting on approval or Waiting on the customer — and the note ends "with less than a working day to the promise" rather than naming the hours. Those hours are counted in hours you are open, using your own shop hours — an eight-hour cushion across a Sunday is not a cushion. Being late is the exception: that is measured on the ordinary clock, because a customer standing at your counter at six is not consoled by the shop being shut.

The two kinds of unknown

"Unknown" is a real answer here, not a placeholder, and the product would rather say it than colour a car green on evidence it does not have. But it covers two different situations and the badge alone cannot tell them apart. Read the headline underneath it.

• No promise was ever made. The headline reads No promised time — nobody has told this customer when the car goes home.
• There is a promise, nothing is obviously wrong, but one of the checks had no data to work with. Usually that is time: if nobody in the shop clocks time to jobs, the product cannot know whether a car has been started, and it says This shop doesn't clock time to jobs — can't tell if it's started. The other two are no labour priced yet, and no time clocked on this particular job.

A real problem is never softened by a missing signal. If anything is pressing, the car reads At risk even when other checks came back blank.

Where you see it

Every board card carries the promise as a line of text — Promised today 5:00 PM, Was due yesterday 3:00 PM, or No promised time — and column headers count the late ones. The in-progress header also counts cars flagged waiting on parts, because that is a reason the work is stuck rather than a separate stage of work. Schedule › Promised times shows cars overdue or due in the next 30 days, plus cars opened in the last 30 days with no promise, worst first. Its counts cover that same window. The order screen shows the badge, the headline, and every check with a tick, a question mark or an exclamation beside it, so you can see what the verdict was built from.