Reading a ticket's Comms and Activity

A repair order keeps two records of what happened around it, and they answer different questions. Comms is the conversation and customer-facing history attached to this order. Activity is the recorded trail of changes and business events on the order and its related work.

Where to find them

An order opens on the order workspace unless you have switched. There, Activity is the fold at the foot of the rail on the right, and the same list sits under the Summary tab. To read or answer the customer without leaving the order, press Message in the toolbar: the drawer that opens is the conversation.

The Comms timeline and the full, paged Activity trail are tabs on the classic order screen, and the workspace does not show either. Press ⋯ beside Close, then Switch to the classic order screen, and they are in the row of tabs. The classic screen's own ⋯ has Try the new order workspace to come back.

Comms: one order's whole conversation

Comms puts every order-tagged text, email and call record into one newest-first timeline. Customer approvals join it, along with the approval link being issued and completed. You do not have to reconstruct the conversation from the inbox, the estimate and the phone log.

Each line says who spoke, its channel, its time in the shop's timezone and any delivery state that needs attention. An automatic message says Sent automatically; an inbound one says They said; a shop reply says We said. The complete tab is read-only. Open the customer's message thread when you need to reply.

An internal note is a different kind of row, labelled Internal — never sent and separated from the customer conversation by structure as well as appearance. Customer view removes those rows and their count from the page entirely. A note cannot become customer-visible merely because it shares this timeline.

Activity: the audit trail as sentences

The classic screen's Activity tab shows the complete scoped trail for this repair order, newest first. It collects events recorded against the order, its services and lines, inspections, invoices and payments. Each row keeps the actor, a plain-language sentence, a timestamp rendered in the shop's timezone and, when one exists, a link to the document the event produced.

Known event codes become labels such as Payment recorded, Estimate signed and Inspection completed. A code added by a newer writer is not discarded or translated into a guess. Until the reader knows it, the literal code is shown, so an event such as future.service.event remains visible and searchable.

The Activity fold in the workspace's rail, the list under its Summary tab, and the small Activity panel beside the classic screen's other tabs all show five rows, with Show all linking to the organization audit page. The classic screen's dedicated Activity tab removes that five-row collapse and pages through the complete order trail. Reversals remain separate sentences; putting a change back never erases the original event it answers.