The trash, and the 30 days you have to change your mind

Records sent to Trash can be restored for 30 days. A directly retired phone or removed email never goes there and has no undo.

For owner, manager · checked against the product on 2026-09-15

A record sent to Torqix's 30-day bin is not deleted the moment you press the button. It moves to Trash, a single list of everything binned in the last 30 days, with the button that puts it back. The page header says it plainly: 30-day window.

Restore puts the record back exactly as it was. Same record, same internal identity, same history hanging off it, nothing renumbered. A customer comes back with their phone numbers and email addresses; a vehicle comes back with its mileage log; a job comes back with its labour and its parts. There is no half-restore anywhere in the product — a restore either happens whole or it is refused with a sentence.

Those contact details come back only because the whole customer was in the bin. A directly retired phone number or removed email address never enters Trash and cannot be restored from there. Its confirmation panel says there is no undo; the activity log keeps a note, and typing the detail in again creates a new contact row.

What can go in the bin

Fourteen kinds of record: Customer, Vehicle, Job, Canned service, Spec entry, Part, Segment, Task, Fleet account, Inspection template, Order, Vendor, Labor matrix and Pricing matrix. Each row in the bin carries that word as a badge, so you can tell at a glance what you are looking at.

A repair order is on that list, and it is the one worth being exact about. Open the ticket, press Delete in its actions menu, and a draft nothing has happened to yet goes to the bin for 30 days with its services, its lines and its fees. A ticket with work behind it does not: an invoice, a payment, a deposit, an answered discount, a signed authorization, a document already sent or an inspection recorded each refuse it by name, and what you do with one of those is close it or decline it rather than delete it.

The panel that asks ends with Yes, delete it, and anybody who can edit repair orders can press it. A draft goes whole — services, lines, fees, photos, the promised-time trail — and Restore puts it back on the board with the same number. When an order cannot go, the refusal is rendered in that panel where the button would have been, so you read why before you decide. What does go is restorable for the same thirty days as everything else here, which is also the warning: an order nobody fetches back inside the thirty days is purged with the rest. If work you expected to find is missing from the board, look in the bin before you rebuild it.

Invoices, payments, appointments, message threads, stock movements and time entries are the records with no delete path. Those are not "harder to delete" — there is no path that deletes them at all. The product's position is that what a customer was charged, and what was said to them, is a record of what happened, and a record of what happened is not ours to remove.

Two of the fourteen kinds can be in the bin without there being a button that puts them there. There is no delete control on a customer or a part — if you are hunting for one, you are not missing it. They reach the bin by other routes (undoing a CSV import, mostly), and the restore works the same either way. The other twelve each have their own control where the record lives: Delete vehicle on a car — open its record, press it, read the refusal or the 30-day explanation, then confirm — Retire on a canned service, Move this service to the trash in the overflow menu on its own service card, which bins that priced service off a live ticket with its lines and its fees, and a Delete on a fleet account, a vendor, an inspection template, a labor matrix, a pricing matrix, a saved segment and a customer's task.

Every delete control in the shop asks before it acts, and they all ask the same way. Press Retire on a service and the button is replaced, in the card itself, by a panel naming that service and saying what is about to happen: off the menu, out of the picker on every repair order, into the bin for 30 days, and jobs already written from the recipe left alone. Yes, retire it only exists inside that panel; Keep it backs out. It is not a pop-up and there is nothing to dismiss — it is part of the page, so it works on a counter tablet that is still loading.

Deleting a saved segment from Customers › Segments, and deleting a task from the Tasks card on a customer's page, both work exactly like that and both land in the bin. Neither was true until recently: those two buttons used to remove the row for good. If you were told otherwise, or you read it here, that is out of date — a segment you delete keeps its name and its questions for 30 days, and so does a task. After the delete, the screen says so: Segment moved to the trash — restorable for 30 days.

Undoing an import bins the customers and the vehicles that import created, for the same 30 days, rather than erasing them — so a mapping you got wrong is one restore away rather than a re-import away.

Why it sometimes says no

A record with work behind it cannot be binned. Rather than a generic error, the product names the thing in the way and the fix. These are the sentences you will actually meet:

This customer has 3 repair orders. Work history is never deleted.
This customer still has 2 vehicles. Move or delete the vehicles first.
This customer has appointments on the schedule. Cancel them first.
This customer has a task. Clear it first — it gets its own 30 days in the bin.
This vehicle has a service reminder. Dismiss the reminder first.
This vehicle is on a maintenance schedule. Remove it first.
This vehicle has a state inspection on the books. An inspection due date is a record.
This job is on the follow-up list. Dismiss the follow-up first.
A technician has clocked time to this job. Time records are never orphaned.
That order has been invoiced. An invoiced order never changes.
This job carries a core deposit owed back to a vendor. A core deposit is money on the books.
This job came from an inspection finding. The sheet is the evidence for the work, so the job stays with it.
This part has 14 stock movements behind it. Deactivate it instead — the count history has to survive.

The same idea runs the other way. A row in the bin that cannot go back shows the reason where the Restore button would have been, instead of offering you a button that fails when you press it. The common ones are that the record's owner is gone too (restore the customer first), that something has taken its place since — a SKU reused, a duplicate created — or that the order it belonged to has been invoiced in the meantime.

Who can bin, and who can restore

These are two different keys, and the asymmetry surprises people. Deleting follows the record: an advisor who can open the customer file can bin a customer. Restoring needs Put deleted things back, which only owners and managers hold — so an advisor cannot see Trash at all, and cannot undo their own delete. It is deliberate: the bin is one list holding fourteen kinds, including your price list, your parts and your two pricing matrices, and opening it to everybody who can delete a customer would show the front desk things they were never given.

If you run more than one location, the bin is the location you are standing in — for everybody, an owner included. Whoever opens Trash sees what was deleted at the shop the shell says they are working at, and the header says This location so it is clear that is what you are looking at. There is no all-locations view of the bin and no owner override: to see another shop's, switch location first, the same way you would to see its board. Customers, vehicles, canned services, saved segments, fleet accounts, inspection templates and both kinds of matrix belong to the whole organisation rather than to one shop, so they show up for everybody either way. Jobs, spec entries, parts, tasks, vendors and orders are the ones that are fenced.

Restore is fenced the same way, and it is fenced in the action rather than only in the list: an entry from another location is not shown, and pasting its address in is refused with That item is no longer in the bin. — the same sentence a genuinely expired entry gets, which is deliberate. So if something you deleted is not where you expect it, check which location the shell says you are in before concluding it is gone.

Every delete and every restore writes a line to the audit trail with your name on it, inside the same transaction as the change itself. There is no way to bin something quietly.

After 30 days

On day 31 the item stops being listed and can no longer be restored by anyone, including us through the app. The bin shows a Gone in column counting the days down, and colours the last week of it so a full bin does not quietly run out.

Restoring spends the undo. The bin entry is the undo, so once you have used it the row leaves the list — you do not end up with the record and a copy of it.

Where this stops

Removing the sample data really does remove it

The one delete in the product that does not go to the bin is Remove sample data on the first-run screen, which takes out the test-stamped practice customers and their cars for good. It is the safest place in the product for that to be true — the rows were never yours, they carry a test badge, and they count in no report or total. It is also the one place where the bin would make things worse: loading the samples again is the real undo, and that offer only does anything when no test customer is left, so a sample sitting in the trash would quietly earn you a second set of them. A sample customer you have actually used is kept rather than removed, and the page tells you how many. That covers a repair order, a booking, a conversation, a task, a saved tire quote, and a car with a service reminder on it. But if you have been treating a sample customer as a real one, move the work off them first, because that button will not offer them back.

Where this stops

A file you remove is kept for 30 days, and only one screen puts one back

Removing a photograph, a clip or a document hides it for 30 days rather than erasing it, and the stored file itself is not touched at all. That is the right half. Here is the rest of it. No removed file is listed in Trash — the bin holds records, and a file is not one. One screen does list its own: while an inspection is still in progress, each removed photo or clip stays on its item with the date its bytes may go and a Restore photo beside it. Complete the inspection and that offer is gone. Nothing else in the product has one: a file you remove from a repair order and a file you remove from the document library are not listed anywhere and no screen puts either back. The 30 days are how long the copy survives before the nightly clear-out, not an undo you can reach — inside them, recovering one needs us.