For waiting on a part to come in, they should create the estimate and sell the estimate and then hit perform work later. The office can order the part and create a PO on the job for it. You can convert that sold estimate into a new job within the project. We then utilize custom fields on the new install job to help us keep track of orders. We currently have 2,000 door installs on hold as we wait for the order to come in from our vendor and we created a custom field for the beginning, middle and end of each month. When we get the ETA back from the vendor, we update that custom field on the install job. The nice part about custom fields is that they are searchable so at this point, I am looking at all orders due by End of October and calling vendors to see where any open ones are and alerting the customers in advance of the delay. This process greatly reduced customer service issues as we fought through the very difficult supply chain issues in the garage door industry. We also have a custom field called waiting for ETA and that is what the Install Coordinator selects when they book the sold estimate and put the install job on hold. This allows us to search for those jobs too and make sure our vendors are getting back to us with ETAs. You dont want to find out 4 months later when a customer calls in pissed asking where there door is that the vendor "never saw the order" .
Element Mist
