The customer's signature, typed and drawn

When a customer approves work from the link you sent them, they type their name. That is the signature, and it always has been: a name typed into a one-time link, recorded with the time, the address it came from, the browser, and the exact version of the estimate they were looking at. Every element the law asks for is in that record.

Underneath it there is now a box headed Draw your signature (optional), with a sentence saying exactly what it is worth: Typing your name above is your signature. Drawing one as well is optional and adds nothing you have to do — leave this blank and your approval is exactly as valid.

So what does the drawing buy? Not validity — that was already there. It buys weight in front of a human being: a card network's adjudicator, a judge in a small claims court, or the customer's own memory six months later. A name that looks like their name is harder to argue with than a name that was typed.

How it works for them

Finger, stylus or mouse, all the same. The box says so — Signature box — draw with your finger, a stylus, or the mouse — and the page still scrolls under a thumb because only the box itself catches the drag. There is a Clear button and nothing else; nothing is smoothed, straightened or scored, and a shaky signature is left exactly as shaky as it was drawn.

It arrives with the approval, in the same submission — one press, one record. If their phone has JavaScript switched off the box simply is not there, and they approve the work with the typed name as usual.

What is stored is the strokes and nothing else: no pressure, no per-point timing, no speed, no tilt, no device fingerprint and no image file. Those are the things that turn a picture of a name into a biometric record, and they are left out on purpose. The audit trail gets a fingerprint of the drawing rather than the drawing.

Where you will see it afterwards

• On the customer's own page after they approve, above the Signed by line.
• On the ticket, inside the green signed strip, labelled Signature drawn by and their name.
• On the ticket's signed-invoice line and on a completed inspection's signed line, under the Signed by sentence — the same drawing the customer is looking at on their own copy of that document.
• On the printed repair order, once per authorisation in the history.
• Inside a chargeback packet, drawn from the frozen copy taken when the packet was built.

The approval also turns up where you are already looking. The moment somebody signs, Torqix draws the signed copy as its own document and posts it into that customer's conversation as a card headed Approved estimate with the order number, a Signed badge, the total that was agreed, the car and their name. A shop is told that work was approved rather than having to go and find out. The card carries a PDF link to the signed copy itself.

It lands on the customer's side of the thread and moves the unread count, because the customer is who did it. It is written once per signature: a reload, a double press or a retry finds it already there and posts nothing. Sign, have the shop revise the work, then sign again, and the second signature is its own card and its own document rather than a replacement for the first.

The signed copy is a second document rather than the estimate redrawn. The estimate the customer received was drawn when it was sent and is never rendered again — a file somebody already holds must not change under them — so the record of what was agreed to is drawn fresh at the signature and dated the moment it was signed.

This estimate-approval signature does not get copied onto the invoice or a counter-sale receipt. When the shop requires an invoice signature, the customer signs that invoice as its own document and creates a separate authorization.

It cannot be edited or replaced. The record it sits on can be read and written once and never updated, which is the whole point: evidence the party who benefits from changing it can change is not evidence. Deleting the customer takes it with them; nothing else removes it.