Record a production site survey

The item list is built once, when the survey record is created, and only for a production survey. For each line of the linked sale order that has a product and a remaining quantity above zero, WindoorERP creates one survey item carrying the line's code as the Item Code, its description, its width, height and area as the quoted figures, its sill height, and its floor and room — creating the floor and room records if they do not exist yet. The measured quantity starts at zero, waiting for the surveyor.

Remaining quantity is the ordered quantity minus what previous production surveys have already posted. So a second production survey against the same order loads only what is still unmeasured, and an order that has been fully surveyed produces an empty survey — which is exactly why Start Survey then refuses.

The baseline is deliberately the confirmed order and never the pre-quote survey. The pre-quote was an estimate; what the customer signed may differ from it, and production has to match what was sold. Where the pre-quote's work is genuinely useful, Copy from Pre-Quote in the header brings it across by hand: it works only while the survey is still a draft with no items, finds the latest started pre-quote on the same request or order, and copies the item list with its measurements, aperture readings, site conditions and fittings — but not its photographs, remarks or completion flags — stamping the source survey on the record. Its success message is "Survey items copied from the Pre-Quote survey."

Two other creation routes exist. Add New Item adds an unordered opening by hand while the survey is in draft or in progress — the office's decision, not the surveyor's, because an extra opening on a priced order is a variation. And a production order can raise a change-request survey against itself for rework, which arrives with the Change Request ribbon and behaves differently at approval (below).

Production Surveys opens as a list, with a kanban and a calendar behind the switcher at the top right, all three filtered to production surveys and hiding cancelled ones behind the removable Not Cancelled facet.

Its search view adds one filter the pre-quote search does not have: Has Not-Ready Items. The rest — the state filters and the State, Surveyor and Customer groupings — are the same.

The header runs Start Survey (draft), Mobile App (draft or in progress), Complete Survey (in progress), Approve and Reject (pending approval, survey managers only), Cancel (anything but approved or cancelled), Reset to Draft (cancelled only) and Copy from Pre-Quote, which appears only while the survey is a draft with no items. To their right sit Print PDF, Export Excel, Export CSV, Email Report and — once the survey is Completed or Approved — Create Production Order.

An amber Has Not-Ready Items ribbon crosses the top corner whenever any opening is flagged. The smart buttons are Customer Location and Get Directions when the site has coordinates, Sale Order, Done, a warning Site Not Ready tile, Duplicate, Compare to Order, and — from the production module — Production, counting the production orders raised from this survey.

The guidance strip under the title says what is outstanding: Add production items before starting, Ready for site verification, Continue the 5-step check, Site readiness issues found with the count, Manager approval required, Ready for production handoff. When the survey was built with Copy from Pre-Quote, a small line under the title names the pre-quote it came from.

The tiles below are the production survey's dashboard: Items done of total, Completion with its bar, Quoted Area, Surveyed Area, an Area Diff tile that turns from green to red when the difference leaves ±5%, a Not Ready count when anything is flagged, and an Approval Required tile while the survey is heading for a manager.

Opening an item from a production survey always lands on the production item form — a five-page wizard, not the pre-quote's single screen. Its header carries Complete Item and Re-edit, a Split Item button when the quantity is above one, and a Site Status group holding the Site Not Ready? toggle.

Two guards fire from this screen. Complete Item refuses with "Please enter surveyed dimensions before marking as complete." while width and height are empty, and a not-ready item refuses with "Please provide a reason why the site is not ready." and "Please upload a photo showing the site condition." Typing a measured quantity larger than the ordered one raises a Quantity Warning — "Surveyed quantity (…) exceeds quoted quantity (…). Please verify this is correct." — which is a warning and not a block.

An order line for five identical windows is one item on the survey, and five real openings in a wall that are rarely identical. The scissors button — on the row, and on the item screen while the quantity is above one — splits it. Up to seven units it splits immediately: the original keeps one unit as its balance and the rest become children named code-1, code-2 and so on, each with quantity 1 and its own empty measurements, photos and remarks. Above seven, the Split Survey Line dialog asks for the Quantity to Split Off and shows the computed Balance (stays in main item).

The refusals are worth knowing: "Cannot split an item with quantity of 1 or less.", "Can only split items in Draft or In Progress surveys.", and in the dialog "You must keep at least 1 unit in the main item. The most you can split off is %d." Split children keep their suffixed codes for good, and repeated splits continue the numbering rather than restarting it.

Complete Survey routes a production survey to Pending Approval whenever approval is required — and for a production survey it always is while Require Production Approval is on, which is the shipped default, regardless of how small the difference turned out to be. A to-do, Survey Approval Required, is raised on every Survey Manager.

Then Approve, and this is the consequential moment in the whole flow:

Reject returns the survey to Draft — not to In Progress — and closes the to-dos with "Production survey rejected — returned for corrections". Nothing is posted. An approved survey cannot be cancelled ("Cannot cancel an approved survey.") and is not re-openable: corrections go through a re-visit request, which on an already-approved survey creates a linked draft revision copy rather than reopening the signed original, so the posted quantities are never counted twice.

A change-request survey — one raised from a production order for rework — always requires approval and behaves differently at the end: it skips the quantity write-back entirely and instead pushes each item's latest design analysis, design data and image back onto the production order item it came from, noting in the production order's log which items were updated and which were skipped for having no analysis.

Two different five-percents live on this form and they are not the same number. The per-item pass / fail badge, and the colour of the Area Diff tile, are fixed at ±5% of area difference. Approval routing uses the configurable Approval Threshold (%) in Settings, which also defaults to 5. Raising the threshold changes who has to sign; it does not change a single badge.

The Compare to Order smart button opens the Survey vs Sale Order dialog: a read-only, item-by-item table of the ordered width, height, area and sill height against the surveyed ones, with the width, height and area differences and a percentage on every row, plus a Comparison Summary of the two total areas and the overall difference. Rows and totals are green inside ±5% and red outside it. It is the screen to have open while deciding whether to approve.

Called from a pre-quote survey it looks for the production survey on the same order, and stops with "No production survey found for comparison. Please create and complete it first." On a survey with no order behind it, it stops with "This production survey is not linked to a sale order to compare against."

Create Production Order appears once the survey is Completed or Approved. It copies every completed item onto a new production order: the measured quantity (or 1 where none was given), the unit price, and per item the production design and its cut-list analysis — preferring the survey item's own design and falling back to the sale-order line's when the item has none. Each fallback is written into the production order's log, so what the factory is building from is never a guess.

Items that were completed but did not Pass are copied too, with a warning in the log naming them: "Warning: the following completed items did not pass the check point: … Please remove them manually…". Nothing is copied for an item that was never completed. The refusals are "Production orders can only be created from production surveys." and "No completed items found on this survey. Please mark survey items as completed before creating a production order."

Note what approval and the production order do not do between them: neither rewrites the order's dimensions. The measured size reaches the factory through the item's own production design. Where the design modules are installed, each survey row carries its own Production Design JSON and image — an independent copy of the sale order line's design, so editing it here never touches the original — with buttons to create or edit that design in the WebCC designer and to run or re-run its analysis. A design that has never been drawn answers "No production design data to analyse. Please open the WebCC designer and save a design first."

The bulk dialog's own note still calls the field Produced Quantity. It is the same field the order line now labels Surveyed Qty; only the wording is stale.

Print PDF renders the production survey report: per opening a quoted / surveyed / difference band, a colour-coded result stripe — green pass, red fail, amber not ready — the design image, the reason an opening was not ready, the site photographs, and the area totals. It is the document to send when a size has moved and somebody has to agree to it.

Export Excel and Export CSV produce the production export, which carries quoted against surveyed and the site conditions — the pre-quote export has neither. Both check your access rights before rendering.

The surveyor's portal — /my/surveys

The surveyor works from a phone at /my/surveys as a portal user with no WindoorERP seat. A production survey gets its own capture screen, deliberately different from the pre-quote one: it shows every opening's quoted size beside the field for the measured one, offers the aperture calculator, the site-not-ready outcome with its photograph, and the split — and it has no add-item button. Trying anyway answers "Items cannot be added to a production survey. Report the extra opening to the office so it can be priced." An extra opening on a priced order is a commercial event, so it travels back as an Extra opening found report instead, landing in Site Surveys › Field Portal › Reported from Site.

Every measurement the surveyor sends is filtered through a fixed allowlist before it is written — dimensions, apertures, diagonals, tangent points, item identification, all the site conditions, the outcome fields, the images and the measurement provenance. Anything outside it, including the survey link, the order line and every quoted figure, is dropped in silence. The write is then refused outright once the survey is locked: "This survey is locked (…) and can no longer be edited."

The ready check before submitting lists all blockers at once — items neither measured nor marked not-ready, a not-ready item without its reason, a not-ready item without its photograph (a production-only rule), a completed item missing a dimension — and adds two advisories that never block: openings outside the configured tolerance, with the note that a manager will have to approve, and openings that disagree with their own siblings. Submit completes the survey exactly as the back-office button does, which for a production survey means it lands in Pending Approval.

When the phone was offline and the office edited the same survey meanwhile, the reconciliation splits by ownership: the surveyor's measurements win, the office's codes, floors, rooms and completion flags stand, and everything that was overruled is written openly into the survey's chatter. No portal route can approve anything. The surveyor's whole experience — the day plan, the outcomes, the customer message templates, the re-visit requests, the performance page — is documented in Measure on site from the surveyor's phone.

The customer's page — /my/survey/<id>

Singular, and a different audience. Every survey carries an access token from birth, and /my/survey/<id>?access_token=… renders a public page showing the customer only progress and logistics: reference, order, status badge, survey type, the scheduled and completed dates, who is attending, a progress bar, a warning naming how many openings were found not ready, the site contact and access notes, and the signature once it exists. No measurements, no differences, no prices — which is what makes the link safe to hand out on a job where sizes have moved.

The token is checked properly, but no button or field in the interface gives you the link: the action that mints it and the Portal URL that holds it appear on no form and no menu. Ask your administrator if you need one.

"Cannot start a Production Survey without any survey items. Please add items first or copy from a Pre-Quote survey." — the linked order had nothing left to survey (every quantity already posted by an earlier survey), or the survey was created without an order behind it. Check the Sale Order field first.

"Survey already has items. Please delete the existing items before copying." — Copy from Pre-Quote only fills an empty survey, by design.

"No completed pre-quote survey found for this task." — the pre-quote is still in Draft or was cancelled. It has to have been started to be a source.

"Survey must be in Pending Approval state to approve." — somebody has already decided, or the survey never reached approval because Require Production Approval was switched off and the difference was inside the threshold.

"No completed items found on this survey." — Create Production Order takes completed items only. Mark them done, or flag the ones that could not be measured as not ready with their reason and photograph.

The order line's quantity did not change after approving — either the item was not marked Done, or it has no sale-order line behind it (an opening added by hand), or this survey had already posted once and the second run was skipped in silence. The skip is recorded only in the server log; the survey's Quantity Posted to Order flag is the field that tells you.

The badge under the reference says Pre-Quote Survey on a PRS- record — you arrived by URL rather than by clicking the row. Go back to Production Surveys and open it from there before doing anything, and above all before approving.

The exhaust cut-out, grill position or hinge colour printed blank on the report — they have no input field anywhere in this release. Record them in Remarks & Deviations.

An expected notification never arrived — the scheduled reminder and overdue-alert events have no scheduler behind them and do not run, and on tenants upgraded from an earlier release the existing rules for the other events were deliberately switched off. A manager can re-enable them under Configuration › Notification Settings.