Workflow
Admin, Workflow (/admin/workflow), gated by the workflow.manage
permission.
None of these are hard-coded enums. Statuses, priorities, coverages, repair types, loan user groups and the parts catalogue are all per-tenant data you control. So is whether several workflow features exist at all.
Do this before anyone lodges a real submission. Changing a status afterwards means deciding what happens to the submissions sitting in it.
Feature switches
Section titled “Feature switches”The top of the page turns individual workflow features on and off. Off means the field does not appear anywhere, rather than appearing and being ignored.
| Switch | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Priorities | Whether staff can set a priority on submissions |
| Assign technicians | Whether a submission can be assigned to a person |
| Staff loans | Whether loans show the staff and student distinction |
| Police report number | Capture a police report number on insurance jobs |
| Budget code | Capture a budget or cost code on submissions |
| Vendor repair | Whether a submission can be booked out to an external repairer |
A small primary school with two technicians usually turns off priorities and assignment, because both add a click to every job and neither changes what happens. A large school with a bench and a queue wants both.
Priorities
Section titled “Priorities”The urgency levels. Each has a label, a colour and a rank. The rank sets the order they appear in and the order the queue sorts by.
Priorities drive SLA targets, so if you want response and resolution clocks, define priorities first and set targets second.
Statuses
Section titled “Statuses”The stages a submission moves through. Each has a label, a colour, a rank, and optionally an external status it maps to.
A typical set:
- Received or Open, newly lodged and waiting to be picked up
- Assigned or In progress, a technician owns it
- Awaiting parts, or With vendor, blocked on something external
- Ready, fixed and waiting for collection
- Closed, handed back
Rename these to whatever your desk already says out loud. If your team says “on the bench”, call it that. Matching the words people already use is worth more than matching anyone’s idea of a standard.
Mapping to an external system
Section titled “Mapping to an external system”The external status field maps a Plugboard status onto a status in a ticketing system you also run, so a status change here can be reflected there. Set it if you run Zendesk or Web Help Desk alongside.
Ticket statuses
Section titled “Ticket statuses”Tickets have their own status list, configured in the same place. The labels, colours and order are yours. The service level clock follows the resolved and closed meanings you assign rather than the words you use.
Coverages
Section titled “Coverages”Who pays. The shipped set is warranty, insurance and chargeable, and most schools keep those three.
Coverage appears to the person when they lodge a repair, so they know before they hand the device over whether this is likely to cost them anything. It is also how cost analytics splits spending, which is the number your business manager asks for.
Repair types
Section titled “Repair types”What kind of repair it is, and which coverage it carries. Cracked screen under insurance. Battery replacement under warranty. Liquid damage, chargeable.
These appear in the kiosk when somebody lodges, so word them the way a fifteen-year-old would recognise. “Damaged display” rather than “LCD assembly failure”.
Loan user groups
Section titled “Loan user groups”Categories a loan pool serves, such as Students, Staff or Senior School. A loan group names the user groups it is for, which pre-fills sensible defaults when a technician registers a new loan device.
Parts and prices
Section titled “Parts and prices”What technicians pick from when they record a repair outcome, and what each part usually costs.
Kept per kind of device, because an iPad screen and a laptop screen are not the same part and pretending otherwise makes the numbers useless:
| Kind | Covers |
|---|---|
| Laptops | MacBooks and other notebooks |
| iPads | Tablets |
| Desktops | iMacs, towers, all-in-ones |
| Other | Anything else in the fleet |
You start with an opinionated list rather than an empty one, priced for a school Mac fleet, because the parts list is the thing a technician meets on their first repair and an empty one sends them back to typing. Every row is yours to rename, re-price, hide or delete.
How pricing behaves
Section titled “How pricing behaves”- Ticking the parts that were replaced adds their prices up into the repair’s cost.
- Typing over the total wins. A part sourced in a hurry, or supplied free under warranty, means the sum is wrong and what you type is right.
- A price change only affects repairs recorded from then on. Parts keep the price they were saved with, so last term’s numbers do not move when you update a supplier price.
- Hiding a part keeps it on the repairs that used it but takes it off the picker. Use this when a part is discontinued: the history stays intact and nobody selects it again.
Where these changes show up
Section titled “Where these changes show up”Everything on this page flows through to:
- The kiosk, where repair types and their coverage appear when somebody lodges.
- The submissions queue, where statuses and priorities are the filters.
- Cost analytics, which groups by type and coverage.
- SLA targets, which are set per priority.
- Automation rules, whose conditions match on type, priority and coverage.
- Reports.
All of those refer back to these definitions, so setting them first saves work.
Changing things later
Section titled “Changing things later”Renaming is safe. A label change updates everywhere, and history keeps its meaning because records reference the key instead of the words.
Deleting is not. Deleting a status leaves submissions pointing at something that no longer exists. The screen will warn you and, where possible, refuse. Prefer disabling: a disabled entry stops appearing in pickers but keeps working on records that already use it.