Incoming requests

Requests are where work enters the business. Left in an inbox they get lost, duplicated, or answered twice by different people. Here every request has a state, an owner and its attachments, so nothing is quietly dropped and nobody has to ask who is handling it.

Open a request to see the customer’s CAD files, drawings and requirements.

Quote straight from the request — the customer approves it online and you’re notified.

A request moves through Pending, In Progress, Quoted, Approved and on to Completed — or out to Rejected or Cancelled. The status control only offers the moves that make sense from where the request is, and says whether the customer will hear about it: they are emailed when work starts, when the request completes, and when it is rejected or cancelled; internal shuffles are silent. Untick “Email the customer” to make any change silent.

Completed, rejected and cancelled requests are closed. If the customer comes back, use Reopen request — it needs a short reason for the audit trail, puts the request back in progress and tells the customer it has been reopened.

A customer declining a quote — from the portal or the emailed link — sends the request straight back to In Progress, so it turns up for a re-quote instead of sitting at Quoted with a dead quote. The request page shows the declined quote and the customer’s reason, and the admin inbox gets a “Quote declined” notice on the same toggle as approvals.

The list is a queue, not a log: highest priority first, then the oldest within each priority, so the request that has waited longest sits at the top of its band. While a request is still pending with no quote and no reply from staff, its age shows beside the reference — amber after two hours, red after four — and disappears the moment someone quotes or replies. The Awaiting reply filter shows only those.

A request submitted at the Emergency / line-down priority reaches the admin inbox with [LINE DOWN] at the front of the subject line, so it stands out in a phone notification without being opened. Nothing else changes — it is triaged from the same list, at the top of it.

Each request has a message thread shared with the customer. Ask for a missing dimension, confirm a material, attach a marked-up drawing; the customer replies in the same place and is emailed when you post (untick the email box for a message that can wait). The thread closes with the request — completed, rejected and cancelled requests take no new messages, and the customer is told to start a new request instead.

A customer message nobody has answered counts in the “Customer messages awaiting a reply” tile on the dashboard.