For you

Most products in this market have an inbox: rooms, threads, a per-job chat. Each is a channel that sits beside the record, drifts from the job it is about, and that the product’s own history does not contain.

This product takes the other position. There is no messaging. There are only notes, and a note can be addressed.

Understand what a note is here

• A note that mentions a teammate is a message to them — see Mentioning a teammate in a note.
• A note shared with the client and sent is a message to them, delivered by email or text according to what they agreed to.
• What the client texts back, or types on their own page, lands on the job as a note from them — see When a client replies.

Every one of those lives on the job it is about. Nothing drifts, because nothing left.

Open your queue

For you is one list of everything addressed to you, across every job you can see — the notes that mention you, your clients’ replies, a reply that could not be put on a job, for whoever handles clients and can file it on one of their jobs, and, for whoever runs the schedule, a customer’s online booking: one held for your answer, and one booked outright that nobody in the office has seen yet. A repeat a customer asked for when booking waits here too, with Confirm and Decline, and so does a repeat’s planned visit in the next thirty days that lands on a day you are closed or clashes with something booked since, until it is moved, skipped or booked. For the owner, a reminder to book that is switched on but held, because your postal address is not on Business Details, waits here as Reminders to book are held, naming each, until the address is entered — see Reminders to book. If you carry one of the business’s cards and the business matches card purchases to jobs, each purchase on your card is here too, waiting for you to say which job it was for — answered from the list, with one tap when the match is right. And when the business assigns new work automatically and nobody could take a new visit, whoever runs the schedule finds it here with why, until somebody is put on it. If you drive one of the business’s vans and it counts its vans each month, your van’s count is here from the day it falls due until everything on it is counted; parts on the way to your van wait for you to say they arrived, and your van is here when it is low. For whoever keeps the stock — the owner, managers, dispatchers and bookkeepers — a technician’s request for parts, parts on the way to the shop, each van at or below its levels, and a compliance record’s material or an invoice’s parts that could not be taken from stock wait here too. For whoever bills, a payment due when a stage of the work is done is here the moment that stage is marked done — Bill it opens New Invoice with the job chosen and the payment under Payment schedule — until it is on an invoice. It says which stage and which payment, never the amount; sending the invoice is still yours to do.

It is not a place to talk. There is no reply box on the queue, because replying happens on the job where the conversation belongs. The queue’s job is to make sure nothing addressed to you waits for you to happen to open the right job.

Clear it

An item leaves the queue when you have dealt with it. What is left is genuinely outstanding, which is what makes the count worth looking at.

If it is empty, nothing is waiting on you — and you can believe that, because everything that would be waiting is in one list rather than spread across jobs.

Why not an inbox

A separate chat channel has three problems this arrangement does not: it duplicates the record, it drifts from the job over time, and it does not appear in the job’s own history when somebody reads it back a year later.

Notes are the history. The queue is a view over them.