Filling in an inspection is the bit a technician does on the workshop floor. Tap through each item, set a status, add notes or photos where it matters, and Pistonlog saves as you go.
The five statuses on each item
| Status | Icon | Colour | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acceptable | tick | green | Item is within spec |
| Advisory | warning | orange | Flagged for the customer but not failing yet |
| Rectified | wrench | blue | Technician has fixed the item on this visit |
| Failure | cross | red | Item fails — needs work |
| Not Applicable | circle-slash | grey | Item doesn't apply to this vehicle |
Tapping a status colours the row and saves immediately. Tapping again toggles it off.
Notify a teammate
Marking an item Failure pops up a small Notify someone? prompt next to the button. Tap Yes and a Notify a teammate dialog opens listing your team. Search, tick one or more people, and click Notify. They get an in-app notification naming the item that failed, so the bad news reaches the front desk without you leaving the car.
Tap No and the Failure still applies, just without notifying anyone. You can reopen the prompt later from an item that's already marked Failure.
Notes and photos
Most inspection items support notes and images (configured per-field in the template). Notes are free-text — useful for "left front tyre 3mm tread". Images are captured from the device camera or uploaded from disk and stored against the submission.
Quick Notes
Any inspection note field has a small notepad button beside it that opens your garage's Quick Notes: canned snippets you've saved for the phrases you type over and over. Search, pick one, and the body drops straight into the note. Manage the list under Workshop Settings → Quick Notes.
Fields that fill themselves in
Some fields arrive pre-filled so the technician doesn't retype what Pistonlog already knows:
- Registration: seeded from the vehicle on the jobcard
- Mileage: seeded from the vehicle's last recorded odometer reading, which you'll usually want to correct to what the dash says today
- Date: set to today, if the template has that field's "default to today" option switched on
These are ordinary values once seeded, so type over them if they're wrong. Pistonlog treats an untouched pre-fill as "not yet filled in by a human", so a submission with nothing but auto-filled fields still shows as not started.
Partial saves
Inspections persist as you go. You don't have to finish in one sitting — close the page, come back, the submission is still there with everything you'd already filled. Status stays in_progress until you mark it complete.
If a save fails
Pistonlog also keeps a recovery copy in the browser while you work. If a save fails (patchy workshop wi-fi is the usual culprit) and you come back to that inspection, a Review browser copy dialog opens showing the browser's copy alongside what the server last saved, field by field. For each difference you choose Keep current, Use browser, or, where it makes sense, Keep both, so nothing is silently thrown away.
Permission
Filling in a submission needs inspections.edit. Technicians and Managers have it by default (it doesn't let them build templates, which is a separate key). The default Reception role does not: it can start an inspection on a jobcard and read the result, but the form is read-only until someone grants it inspections.edit.