Finding your way around

The rail

The dark strip down the left groups the places you spend the day into three named bands. Under Today: Dashboard, Board, Schedule, Messages, Voice. Under Work: Quotes, Customers, CRM, Parts, Tires. Under Money & people: Drawer, Disputes, Time, Reports, Assistant. Contact support and Settings stay at the foot of the rail, below all three. Your person button used to be down there with them and is now the round avatar at the right end of the top bar.

If an icon is missing it is because your role does not open that screen — the rail never shows you a door that is locked, and a band whose every door is locked is not drawn at all. Tires, the drawer, disputes and reports come and go with your access; the assistant leaves the rail while customer view is on. CRM is one of the doors that comes and goes: it needs the customer-work key, and without it the door is not drawn in the rail or anywhere else. That is worth knowing before you tell a technician to "go to CRM" — they will not find it.

The second column, beside the rail

Everything else is in a second column beside the rail, and what it holds depends on which band of the rail you are in rather than being one long list. Stand on the board and it offers Board and Quotes; stand on the schedule and it offers Calendar, Appointment requests, Promised times and Calendar feed; the customer band holds Customers, Vehicles, Import and Fleets, and the parts band holds Parts, Purchase orders, Vendors, Services and Specs. The exact list depends on your access, exactly as the rail does.

The settings band is where the once-a-week doors live: Shop settings, My profile, Team, Audit, Support access, Trash, Learn while your own learning track is still open, and Contact support. If you are hunting for one of those, that is the band to be standing in — the column changes with the rail, so a door you saw yesterday on a different screen is not missing, it is beside a different band.

There is no overflow menu anywhere in the shell and nothing folds away on a narrow screen. Below tablet width the second column is not drawn at all, and the way to those screens is Ctrl+K.

Search, and the shortcut

The box in the top bar searches customers, vehicles and orders. It also finds a legacy order number from your old system and tells you exactly what it is. A customer's phone works with or without its spaces, parentheses, dashes or leading country code.

On a screen that sits under another one, the places above it are printed beside the box as small links — Parts on the vendors screen, Reports then All reports on a report — so the way back up is in the same place on every screen and no page has to offer its own. The screen you are on is the heading below rather than a link up here, and a screen with nothing above it, the Board included, prints nothing there.

Beside them is a small open-book link to the manual page about the screen you are on — hover it and it names the page. It is missing on screens we have not written a page about yet, which is deliberate: an empty promise of help is worse than none.

Ctrl+K — or ⌘K on a Mac — opens the same thing as a palette from anywhere, and it takes commands as well as records: Search customers, vehicles, orders — or type a command. Entries either do the thing or are filed under Go to and say Opens in their second line. The palette finds settings screens by what they do, not only by their names. The settings column adds one quiet line beneath each screen name on a wide display. Nothing that spends money or sends a customer anything will ever fire from here.

The plus button, and your account

The Create button in the top bar is the short way to New estimate, New customer, New appointment, New part and New purchase order, with New service and New quick quote under a dividing line. The button becomes a ✕ while its menu is open. Each of the first six rows shows its own keyboard shortcut on the right — Ctrl and Shift and a letter, ⌘ and Shift on a Mac — and a few of those combinations are taken by the browser itself before this page can see them, so the row is always the way that works. Beside the button are your notifications, customer messages, and the shop-only team chat.

Your account is the round avatar at the right end of the top bar, last in that row of controls. It used to sit at the foot of the rail. It opens the Your account menu: your name and sign-in email, a three-way theme control for light, Night bay or whatever your device is set to, the Bay mode switch, and then Personal info, Your notifications, Change password, Appearance, Report a software problem and Sign out. The problem link carries the page you were on into a signed-in report form, so reporting a broken screen needs no API key and no separate support account.

Change password has no box to type a new one into. It opens your profile, where Email me a password link sends a one-time link to your own mailbox that works for an hour. Your password is changed by somebody holding your email and nobody else — not by whoever is standing at a counter terminal you walked away from.

When the deployment is behind

A strip across the app that says This deployment is waiting on a database migration. means Torqix has proved that the deployed code is ahead of its database. The rest of that strip tells you what is safe: everything on the current screen is accurate and safe to work in, while some newer settings screens will not load until the pending migration is applied. Tell whoever deploys Torqix; re-entering the same work will not apply a migration.

A screen that cannot read one of those newer records says that it cannot show it. It does not replace a failed read with an empty list, a zero, or a claim that nothing has happened yet. An ordinary empty state therefore still means the read succeeded and there is nothing in that view.