Finding your way around

The rail

The dark strip down the left is short on purpose: one door to where you start, then a few groups. The top door is Board — or My day if your role works from its own day rather than the board. Under it, Today holds My day, Dashboard, Schedule and Time; Work holds Repair orders, Quotes, Parts, Tires and Library; Customers holds Customers, CRM and, when Torqix has switched on a voice line for the shop, Voice; and Money holds Drawer, Disputes and Reports. A Beta group appears only while your shop is trying a module. Settings & help sits at the foot of the rail, with Settings and Contact support inside it. Your person button is the round avatar at the right end of the top bar.

Press a group, or rest the pointer on it, and a small list opens beside the rail with each place's name and icon; press one to go there. Escape, a press anywhere else, or moving on closes it, and only one list is open at a time. The group holding the page you are on stays lit, and a small notch in a group's corner says it opens a list. Without JavaScript a press still opens the list.

Messages is not in the rail: it is the speech-bubble control in the top bar, which opens the same side panel from any screen. Help & support, the Assistant (Ctrl+J) and Staff chat share More instead of taking three places in that row. On a phone the Assistant is also inside Settings & help.

The rail is icons only, at every screen width, so the room goes to your work — on the board that is enough for another lane. Point at an icon, or tab to it, and its name appears beside it — for a group, pointing opens its list, headed by the same name. A screen reader hears the name. There is no button to widen or collapse it any more: the old "Collapse sidebar" choice is gone, and a choice you saved before simply no longer changes anything.

If a place is missing it is because your role does not open that screen — the rail never shows you a door that is locked, and a group whose every door is locked is not drawn at all. Repair orders, 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 part of the app you are in rather than being one long list. Stand on the board and it offers Board, Repair orders 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 index is where the once-a-week shop controls live. Its Team section holds Team and Audit history, while Trash is at the foot of Shop. Opening any settings screen keeps the same eight sections in the column beside it, with the one you are in opened. Let support in is in Team and also appears as Let support in in the app's support controls; Contact support stays there too. Unless you dismissed the former role guide, the same section has Learn for the shared help library, and it is always in Ctrl+K.

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.

Click the box and it opens straight away with what you viewed last and the quick actions — New estimate, New customer and New appointment, as far as your role allows. Start typing and the results appear as you type; you never have to press Enter.

Type it the way it is read out at the counter. Part of a name, or the whole name in either order ("Garcia, Maria" finds Maria Garcia). The start or the end of a phone number. A plate with or without its space or dash. The last six or eight characters of a VIN. An order number as 1042, #1042, RO 1042 or RO-1042; a quote as Q-12; an invoice as INV-3310 or invoice 3310; the customer's PO number off a fleet ticket, with or without its dashes; your own parts order as PO-12. A bare number asks every one of those at once and each row says which it is.

A customer's whole email address finds them, and so does the part before the @ when it has a dot or a digit in it — maria.garcia or dispatch42. A plain word is treated as a name, so typing smith does not search everybody's mailbox. A car is found by its make or model as well: Tacoma, or Ford Transit, where every word has to match. A fleet truck is found by the unit number on its door, and its row starts with that unit.

One wrong or missing letter still finds the record: Rivra finds Rivera, Toyta finds the Toyota, and a plate or a whole VIN with one character wrong finds the car. The list then starts with Showing results for and the spelling it used. That guess is only made when nothing matched as you typed it, so an exact match is never pushed down by a lookalike.

The record you obviously meant comes first — the exact order, plate or number before anything that merely contains it, and people actually called Lee before Kathleen or a fleet account. Each row carries enough to pick the right one: a customer's phone and car, a car's plate and owner, an order's customer, status and, where your role shows money, its total. Press Enter without choosing a row, or search with JavaScript off, and the same search opens as a full page of results.

Results are filed under tabs, the way Shopmonkey files them: All, Customers, Fleets, Orders, Vehicles, Parts and Pages, each with how many it found. A fleet account is a customer, so it is counted under both. Orders holds repair orders, quotes and invoices; Parts is your own purchase orders; Pages is the screens that match what you typed. A count with a plus after it, like 40+, means the search stopped listing there and there are more — type a little more to narrow it. You only see the tabs your role can search, and a count never includes a record you could not open, so a technician's tabs are All, Orders and Pages. The same tabs are across the top of the full results page and under the box in Ctrl+K. Each row says when that record was last edited — Edited 3h ago.

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. They stay on one line; on a narrow window the ones furthest up shorten first, so the nearest stays whole. 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.

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. Like the rail, it only offers places your role can open, so a technician's palette is short. 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 and, under a dividing line, New service. Quick quote is a mode inside New estimate, not a second entry. The button becomes a ✕ while its menu is open. Each of the 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.

Every control in the top bar is an icon: point at one, or tab to it, and a one-word tip names it. The right end stays quiet: More holds Help & support, Assistant and Staff chat; then comes the Create button, Messages, Notifications and your avatar. Recently viewed is not another top-bar button: open search without typing to see the last few repair orders, customers and vehicles you opened, newest first, each with when you viewed it. Ctrl+K shows the same list. Clear recents empties it in both places at once. It is your list in this shop only; anyone else signed in on the same computer keeps theirs.

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, then one Appearance disclosure holding the light, Night bay and device theme choices plus Bay mode, followed by Your notifications, Change password, Report a problem and Sign out. The problem door includes the page you were on in the 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.