Lead to delivery: how a job moves

A job that starts as an enquiry and ends as a delivered car passes through five records. Each one is separate, each has its own number, and each keeps a link back to the one before it.

Why they are separate records

Because they do not map one to one. A lead can carry two quotes, for two different pickup dates or two different trucks. An order can be split across two carriers. A customer with a monthly account gets one invoice covering several orders. Collapsing any of those into a single record means losing the shape of what actually happened, and it is always the awkward job — the one that got re-quoted, split and re-dispatched — that you most need the history of.

Nothing is retyped as a job moves along. Converting a quote carries the customer, the route, the vehicles, the price and the ship date onto the order, and the order keeps a link back to the quote it came from. The same is true of the lead behind the quote.

The money on an order

Four figures move together, and they are the ones every report is built on.

Two things that look like statuses and are not

A quote's status is your agent's read on the customer — hot, warm, cold, voicemail, on hold — not where the quote is in a workflow. Whether a quote is still outstanding, already accepted, or past its ship date is answered from its dates instead. The two questions used to share one field, which meant marking a keen customer as hot quietly made the quote look unanswered.

An order counts as committed the moment a carrier is offered it, not when they accept. Editing after that point is still possible if you have the permission for it, but it is recorded on the timeline and the carrier is re-notified, because they are holding a sheet that no longer matches.