Reading a ticket's Comms and Activity
Use Comms for everything said or completed around one order, and Activity for the order's newest-first audit sentences.
For service advisor, owner, manager · checked against the product on 2026-09-01
Open a repair order and use its Comms and Activity tabs. They answer different questions. Comms is the conversation and customer-facing history attached to this order. Activity is the recorded trail of changes and business events on the order and its related work.
Comms: one order's whole conversation
Comms puts every order-tagged text, email and call record into one newest-first timeline. Customer approvals join it, along with the approval link being issued and completed. You do not have to reconstruct the conversation from the inbox, the estimate and the phone log.
Each line says who spoke, its channel, its time in the shop's timezone and any delivery state that needs attention. An automatic message says Sent automatically; an inbound one says They said; a shop reply says We said. The complete tab is read-only. Open the customer's message thread when you need to reply.
An internal note is a different kind of row, labelled Internal — never sent and separated from the customer conversation by structure as well as appearance. Customer view removes those rows and their count from the page entirely. A note cannot become customer-visible merely because it shares this timeline.
Activity: the audit trail as sentences
Activity shows the complete scoped trail for this repair order, newest first. It collects events recorded against the order, its services and lines, inspections, invoices and payments. Each row keeps the actor, a plain-language sentence, a timestamp rendered in the shop's timezone and, when one exists, a link to the document the event produced.
Known event codes become labels such as Payment recorded, Estimate signed and Inspection completed. A code added by a newer writer is not discarded or translated into a guess. Until the reader knows it, the literal code is shown, so an event such as future.service.event remains visible and searchable.
The small Activity panel beside other ticket tabs shows five rows and links to the organization audit page. The dedicated Activity tab removes that five-row collapse and shows the complete order trail. Reversals remain separate sentences; putting a change back never erases the original event it answers.