Workflow Board

The workflow board is a kanban-style view that shows every live jobcard in your garage, arranged into columns by status. It's the screen most teams keep open all day — one look tells you what's booked in, what's in progress, and what's waiting on parts.

You'll find it at Workflow in the sidebar.

Understanding the columns

Each column is a status you've configured for your garage. If you have five statuses, you'll see five status columns, in the same left-to-right order they appear on your Workshop Settings → Statuses page. Two extra columns can appear alongside them: a grey Estimate column on the far left (if you can view estimates) holding your estimates, and a grey Unassigned column for any jobcard with no status. The Unassigned column only appears when there's actually something in it — if every jobcard has a status, you won't see it at all.

Columns flagged as completion statuses don't fill up forever. The board loads every live jobcard, plus the 20 most recently completed ones, so a completed column shows your recent history rather than the whole archive.

Each column header shows:

• The status colour (a small coloured indicator)
• The status name (e.g. "Booked In", "In Progress")
• A count badge showing how many jobcards are in that column

Columns scroll independently, so you can browse a busy column without losing sight of the others. The board itself scrolls horizontally if you have many statuses.

What each card shows

Every jobcard appears as a card in its current status column. At a glance you can see:

• Jobcard reference — e.g. #42
• Title — the jobcard title; clicking the title opens the inspector panel, while clicking anywhere else on the card opens the full jobcard
• Customer — name with a person icon (technicians don't see the customer name here — the PII strip applies to web jobcard/kanban data too, not just printouts and mobile; see the PII rule)
• Vehicle — registration, make, and model
• Appointment — the booked-in date, and times if set
• Assigned technician — avatar and name shown if someone is assigned

Moving jobcards between columns

Drag a card from one column and drop it into another to change its status. This is the primary way to progress work through your pipeline.

There's no modal that interrupts the drop — the status change saves immediately. (A separate Required Specs dialog can prompt for missing vehicle spec fields when you're working on the jobcard itself, but it doesn't fire on the kanban drag.)

The one exception is dropping a live jobcard into the Estimate column, which turns it back into an estimate. That's a bigger change than a status move, so Pistonlog asks you to confirm first with a Reverse to Estimate dialog. Dragging an estimate the other way, out of the Estimate column into a status, promotes it straight away with no prompt.

Ordering the cards

The Sort by dropdown at the top-right of the board changes the order of the cards inside every column at once — by booking date, date created, last updated, customer, or vehicle registration. Your choice is remembered on that device. See Workflow sort orders for what each option does.

Completion statuses

Statuses that should mark a jobcard as "done" are configured by ticking the Completed status toggle on the status itself (in Workshop Settings → Statuses) — see Jobcard statuses. The toggle is the source of truth; Pistonlog doesn't match by name (so a status called "Done" isn't auto-flagged unless the toggle is on).

There's no separate completion modal that pops up on drop with MOT/Service date fields — those reminder dates are captured at the job level via per-job reminder intervals when you're editing the job, not via a status-change prompt.

Searching the board

A search bar sits at the top of the board. Type to filter cards across all columns at once. The search matches against:

• Jobcard reference number
• Jobcard title
• Customer first and last name
• Vehicle registration, make, and model
• Assigned technician name

Results update as you type.

Live columns are filtered in the browser, so they react instantly. Completed columns work differently: because the board only holds the 20 most recent completions, your search is sent to the server to look through the whole completed history. That means typing a plate from a job you finished six months ago will surface it in the completed column, even though it wasn't on the board a moment earlier.

Team view

A pair of tabs at the top of the page switches between Workflow and Team. The Team tab shows the same work arranged by who's doing it rather than by status: one column per assignable team member, plus an Unassigned column for jobcards nobody has picked up yet.

Drag a card from one person's column to another to reassign the jobcard. It's the fastest way to hand a job over or to balance the load when someone's off.

The Team view is deliberately narrower than the status board: it shows live jobcards only, so estimates and completed jobcards don't appear. The Sort by control is hidden here too, since the columns are people rather than stages.

Creating a jobcard from the board

Click the New Jobcard button to open the jobcard creation dialog without leaving the board. Fill in the title, customer, vehicle, and optionally set a status and appointment date.

Tips

• Arrange statuses left to right to match your real workflow. Most workshops go from intake on the left to collection on the right.
• Flag your completion statuses so the system knows which columns close out a job — see Jobcard statuses.
• Search by registration when a customer calls. Fastest way to find the right jobcard.
• Keep the board open as your team's default screen.