Your first job

A job is the record of one watch coming through your shop, from the moment it’s dropped off to the moment it leaves. Creating one takes the basics: the customer, the watch (brand, model, serial if you have it), the reported issue, and an optional estimate. Bench gives it a number in the shape {your prefix}-J-0001 and starts its history from there.

The seven statuses

Every job moves through the same fixed sequence:

1. Intake. The watch has arrived and been logged.
2. Diagnosis. Someone is figuring out what’s actually wrong with it.
3. Approval. Waiting on the customer to approve the estimate.
4. In repair. The work is happening.
5. Quality check. A second look before it goes back out.
6. Ready for pickup. Done, waiting on the customer.
7. Delivered. Gone. This is a final status.

You can only move a job forward one step at a time, never skip ahead, and never move it backwards; if a job needs to leave the sequence entirely, there’s a separate Cancelled status you can apply from any point before Delivered, with a required reason.

Notes and the timeline

Every time you advance a job, you can leave an optional note explaining what happened, “customer approved bracelet replacement”, “waiting on a part”, whatever’s useful to whoever looks at this job next. That note, along with who made the change and exactly when, gets appended to the job’s timeline. Nothing is edited or overwritten: the timeline is a full, ordered history of every status this job has ever had, so if a customer calls asking why their watch has been “in repair” for two weeks, the answer is already sitting there, not living in someone’s memory.

From job to invoice

Once a job is far enough along to bill, you don’t need to re-enter anything. Its detail page has a “Create invoice from job” action that carries the customer straight into a new invoice, ready for you to add line items and let Bench work out the tax. See Invoices and GST for how that part works.