Why an Order Moved or Changed on Its Own

Some things on the Order Management board happen without anyone dragging a card. Most of them are MonuDesk saving you a step; a couple are a teammate working at the same time as you. This article is a lookup table: find the symptom, read the cause, do the fix.

If your symptom is not here, jump straight to the Activity Timeline on the order. Every stage move, payment, document, approval and to-do change is stamped with the time and the person who did it. Filter to Tasks to read the to-do history on its own.

"My quote is suddenly a confirmed order"

There is one thing that moves a card for you, and it is the most common answer: a payment recorded to finish a stage move you had already started. Dragging a quote to Confirmed Order with no payments logged prompts you to record one, and recording it there completes the move. A payment logged on a quote card on its own does not move it. Apart from that, a person did it, either by dragging the card on the board or by using the stage control inside the order. A family pressing Accept & Sign or picking a quote option in the customer portal does not move the card.

The usual explanation is that the order was never in Quote to begin with. On the last step of New Quote there are two buttons. Save as Quote puts the order in the Quotes stage. Save as Confirmed Order only becomes clickable once you have set a payment split on the billing step, and it creates the order directly in Confirmed Order. A split on its own does not force that route: turn off Link a payment record with the order creation and Save as Quote stays available, keeping the terms on the quote with no payment recorded. If a colleague took the deposit at the counter, they most likely used the second button.

What to do: open the order, go to the Activity Timeline and filter to Status. The stage change is listed with the name of whoever made it, and a payment logged at the same moment tells you it was the payment that carried the card forward. If it was wrong, drag the card back.

"My Stone to-do says Ordered and nobody touched it"

Generating a purchase order advances the matching to-do for you. When the PO covers a stone item (monument, die, base, sub-base or stone) the Stone to-do moves from Must Be Ordered to Ordered. A PO that covers the foundation moves the Foundation to-do the same way. One PO covering both moves both, once each.

Three limits are worth knowing:

• It only advances a to-do that is still sitting on its first step. A Stone to-do already on Waiting on Vendor Response, Vendor Late or Received is left exactly where it is.

• It never runs backwards.

• It never moves the card on the board. Your pipeline stage is yours; only a PO's own to-do changes.

What to do: nothing, unless it is wrong. Click the to-do badge on the card and pick the state you actually want.

Learn more: How to Generate a Purchase Order

"The Design to-do moved or checked itself off"

Approving a drawing completes it. Open Notes & Files, use the row menu on the drawing and choose Approve Drawing; the Design to-do jumps to Complete, and the approval is written to the Activity Timeline with the approver's name.

A drawing can only be approved once, and once a back drawing has been approved it cannot be deleted. If the family wants changes, upload a new drawing rather than trying to undo the approval.

The family can also send a drawing back from the customer portal with Request changes. The Design to-do then moves to Changes Requested by itself, a banner at the top of the order shows the family's note, and the Activity Timeline records Changes requested by the family. Upload the new drawing as External, switch an uploaded one to External, or choose Show to the family when MonuDesk asks after you upload a Front or Back sketch on the order, and the to-do goes back to Family Approval Pending.

"The other quote options disappeared and the total changed"

The family picked an option in the customer portal. When a quote has more than one option, the portal shows Choose Your Memorial, and the family taps one and presses Confirm Quote B (or whichever letter they chose). The chosen option becomes the order: the other options are dismissed and the total changes to that option's total. The card stays in its stage.

What to do: open the Activity Timeline. The entry Customer confirmed Quote B names the family member who chose it, and every team member got a Quote option chosen notification in the bell.

"A to-do I expected never appeared"

MonuDesk works out an order's checklist when the order is created, again the moment it reaches Confirmed Order (or a stage after it), and again each time a confirmed order is edited and saved.

So:

• An order saved as a quote carries only Quote Client and Payment. Everything else, including Stone, Design, Installation and Inspection, arrives when you confirm it. Editing the quote does not bring them forward.

• Add a vase, a photo, lettering or a cemetery with fees to an order that is already confirmed, and the matching to-do is added when you save.

• Take that vase back off and its to-do stays. Checklists are only ever added to, never trimmed.

Check Settings → To-Dos. A to-do switched off there is not added to any order. It stays in the list, greyed, so you can switch it back on. A to-do you created yourself joins new orders only while its Enable on every new order switch is on, and that switch starts off.

What to do: click the settings button at the top right of the order card and switch the to-do on, or off, for that order.

Learn more: What Triggers Each To-Do, How to Customize To-Dos on an Order

"All my to-do lists collapsed"

Cards in the Quote stage open with their to-do list showing. Cards in every other stage start collapsed. So the moment you confirm a quote, that card closes up, because it has left the Quote stage.

Your own clicks beat the default. Expand a confirmed order's card by clicking its task counter and it will still be expanded next time you open the board; collapse a quote card and it stays collapsed. That memory is stored in the browser you are working in, so a different computer, a different browser or a cleared cache starts from the defaults again.

Use Expand all order tasks / Collapse all order tasks at the top of the board to open or close everything visible in one click. That choice is saved to your account: from then on the board opens with every card's to-dos open, or every card's to-dos closed, on any computer you sign in to.

If the cards show only their name and no to-do counter at the bottom, Hide order details is on. Click Show order details in the board toolbar, or click the small to-do count beside a card's name.

"An order vanished off the board"

There are two ways an order leaves the board, and both send it to the Archives window (the archive-box icon in the board toolbar, tooltip Archives (N)) rather than deleting anything.

• Somebody cancelled it. Three-dot (⋯) menu on the order, Cancel Order ("Remove this order from active orders and move it to the cancelled archive."). A confirmation dialog opens first, and confirming there archives the order. It needs the Delete orders permission, so the Activity Timeline names who did it.

• It completed cleanly. MonuDesk archives an order automatically once it has been in the Completed stage for at least 24 hours with every to-do done and no balance owing. The 24 hours count from the moment the order entered Completed, so editing it in the meantime does not restart them, and a to-do counts as done when it sits on its Done step, or on its last step if its list has no Done step, for example Design on Complete. The check runs every night, so a finished order leaves the board on the first nightly check after its 24 hours are up.

That second rule is why one completed order archives itself and the next one does not. If a to-do is still open or a cent is still owed, the order stays visible in Completed indefinitely.

Getting an archived order back. Open the Archives window, find the order and click Restore to board. It goes straight back to the Order Management board, in the stage it was in. The Activity Timeline records it as "Order N restored from the archive". This works for cancelled orders as well as for ones the nightly job archived. Restoring needs the Edit quotes and orders permission. A restored completed order that still meets the rules above is archived again the next night, so move it out of Completed if you need it to stay.

If it is not in the Archives window either, it was deleted. A teammate with the Delete orders permission can delete an archived order from that window with the red trash icon, and a deleted order drops out of the board, the archive, every list and report, the QuickBooks sync table and a partner's board. Nothing is destroyed: its documents, payments, purchase orders and QuickBooks records are all still exactly as they were. There is no button that brings it back, so contact support and we can restore it for you.

Learn more: How to View Archived Orders, How to Cancel/Archive an Order

"A card changed color"

Three different banners can appear across the top of a card, and they mean different things.

• Promise-date alerts read Warning · 12d before promise date in amber, Urgent · 4d before promise date in orange, or Overdue · 3d past promise date in red. They are driven by the promise date and your thresholds in the Order Deadline Alerts card on Settings → Order Alerts. Orders that are Completed, cancelled or archived do not show them. If a red Overdue strip went away while the date is still past, someone dismissed it with the X on the strip: the Activity Timeline names who, and Recover on that entry brings it back.

• The gray price-guarantee strip reads Price guarantee expired · quote 34d old. It only ever appears on a quote, and it is counted from the Quote Started date. The window is set in the Quote Price Guarantee card on Settings → Order Alerts.

• The violet drawing strip reads No drawing for 9 days. It appears when Enable Drawing Reminders is on in the Drawing Reminders card on Settings → Order Alerts and a confirmed order still has no drawing once the Drawing Reminder Window has passed (days after the order was confirmed, 7 unless you change it). It shows in every stage on the confirmed side of the board except Completed. A file of type Drawing, a sketch drawn in the order wizard, a Front or Back sketch uploaded on the order (shown to the family or kept internal) or a design snapshot counts as a drawing; a Reference or Permit file does not. The strip clears as soon as a drawing is added.

A card shows one strip at most, and the promise-date banner wins when both apply. When a promise-date strip is already showing, a due drawing reminder appears as a violet pill on the card instead.

A card that turned amber or red on a date you never promised anyone. A promise date is only ever one you set. Pressing a Quick pick button in New Quote (+1mo, +1.5mo, +2mo, +3mo or +6mo) is one way of setting it: it sets the installation window and sets the Promise Date to the window's last day. Apart from that, saving a quote does not copy the end of the installation window into it.

To take a promise date off an order for good, click the small x on the Promise Date field in Edit Order → Cemetery & Logistics, or on the promise date card in the scheduling panel on the order overview. Remove it there once and it stays removed.

Learn more: How Quote Price Guarantee Works, How to Set Up Order Deadline Alerts

"A stock confirmation popped up when I moved the order out of Quote"

Reaching Confirmed Order is the point where a stone comes off your shelf, so MonuDesk asks first. The prompt appears whenever the order moves from the quote side onto Confirmed Order or a later stage, whether somebody dragged the card or a logged payment carried it forward. A move into a stage you added between Quote and Confirmed Order does not bring it up.

If the stone was linked to inventory in the New Quote, you get a short confirmation naming that exact stone: its name, SKU, color, dimensions and what is on hand, with Deduct and Skip. An order with more than one stone lists a row per stone and base slot, so you can deduct one and skip another. Each stone or base slot is deducted once, so a slot that already came off the shelf is not asked about again.

If the stone on the order was never linked to inventory, you get the full pullable-inventory picker to search, the way it has always worked. You can also reach that picker from the confirmation with the choose a different stone… link, which is what to use when the linked stone is not the piece you are actually pulling.

When the order also owes accessories from stock, such as vases, the prompt has an Accessories section with its own Deduct N units button, and its title reads Deduct stock for order #N?. Each vase line keeps its own color, so stock is matched and deducted per vase color.

What to do: choose Deduct to take the stone off your stock, or Skip to leave your stock untouched. Either way the order has already changed stage; closing the window without deducting anything does not send the card back to Quote.

"It changed while I was looking at it"

The board is live. When a teammate saves an order, moves a card, or adds, checks off or assigns a to-do, your board, your dashboard and any order you have open update on their own within about a second. You never need to refresh. An Edit Order window you have open, and a field you are typing in, are left as they are.

If two of you act on the same card at the same time, you will see Board was updated elsewhere and the board reloads showing whoever landed first. Nothing is lost; drag the card again if you still want it somewhere else.

Right after you click Save as Quote or Save as Confirmed Order, the column shows a placeholder card reading "Creating the quote. It appears here in a moment." (or "Creating the order. It appears here in a moment."). The real card takes its place as soon as it is ready.

Two more things fire off a single stage move, so they can feel like the system acting alone:

• Reaching Confirmed Order confirms the order. When an order moves from the quote side of the board onto Confirmed Order or any stage after it, MonuDesk generates the Invoice, hides the stored Quote PDF from the Customer Portal, syncs to QBO, adds the confirmed-order to-dos and marks Quote Client as done. A stage you added between Quote and Confirmed Order is still on the quote side, so a move into it does none of this.

• The stock confirmation opens right after an order moves from the quote side onto Confirmed Order or a later stage. The stage move has already happened by then, so closing it without deducting anything does not put the card back.

Learn more: How to Confirm a Quote Into an Order

When in doubt, read the Activity Timeline

Every order has an Activity Timeline tab, sitting between Order Details and Notes & Files. It records stage moves, payments added, edited and deleted, documents generated or removed, drawing approvals, to-do activity (added, moved to a new step, assigned, removed) and the moment a customer opened their portal, each one time-stamped and attributed to the person who did it. The chips at the top filter to Payments, Communication, Documents, Tasks or Status.

If an order looks wrong, that tab tells you exactly what happened, when, and who to ask.

Learn more: How the Activity Timeline Works

Related articles:

• Understanding the Order Board

• How Order To-Dos Work

• What Triggers Each To-Do

• How the Activity Timeline Works

• How to Cancel/Archive an Order

• How Quote Price Guarantee Works