Tracking a survey: the job drawer
Opening any job from Jobs opens a tabbed drawer that stays loaded across tab switches, so a half-written note or draft survives you flicking between tabs.
What it is
The drawer has five tabs, always in this order: Overview, Letters & PDFs, Timeline, Notes, and Assignment & costs. Overview carries the scope of survey, required rooms, resident intake and, where enabled, the vulnerability/safeguarding triage panel, plus the case’s stage rail and next-step action. Letters & PDFs lists every resident-letter card available for the case’s current stage. Timeline is the evidentiary record only — access attempts, appointment outcomes, letters sent, and stage transitions, including the statutory clock where the case has one. Notes is the separate home for internal case notes, never surfaced to the resident. Assignment & costs shows who the job is assigned to and, where applicable, repair costing.
The drawer opens on a tab chosen from the case’s current lifecycle stage rather than always defaulting to Overview — reopening a case you were last looking at within the same session returns you to the tab you were on.
How to do it
- Open Jobs from the sidebar and click any row to open its drawer.
- Switch tabs freely — nothing you’ve typed is lost switching away and back.
- Use Overview’s stage rail and next-step action to see exactly where the case sits and what to do next; see The case lifecycle end to end for what each of the eight stages means and what the available next-step actions are at each one.
- Use Timeline when you need the honest evidentiary record rather than a summary — every access attempt, letter and stage change, in order.
- Use Notes for anything internal that shouldn’t reach the resident; it deliberately sits apart from Timeline for exactly that reason.
How it integrates
The stage rail always shows all eight stages — done, current, skipped or upcoming — with a timestamp where known, and inline chips for the honest exceptions (a summary marked provided externally rather than through the platform, works verified by attestation rather than a re-survey, a case closed without verification, and so on) so a shortcut taken is visible, not hidden. The Dashboard’s “Needs attention” panel surfaces overdue, unassigned and stalled cases drawn from the same underlying case data the drawer shows. A case whose works have progressed onto a separate works order shows only a link to open that works order from Overview — the live actions have moved there.
Common problems
- The drawer opened on a tab I didn’t expect. It’s following the case’s current stage — Timeline for cases waiting on a summary, Assignment & costs once works are verified, and so on — not a fixed default.
- I can’t find the internal note I added. Notes has its own tab, separate from Timeline; it never appears in the evidentiary record shown there.
- I don’t see a “Next step” action at all. A closed case has none — closure is deliberately the end of the line for that record.