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.

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 no longer forces 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 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 can no longer be deleted. If the family wants changes, upload a new drawing rather than trying to undo the approval.

"A to-do I expected never appeared"

MonuDesk works out an order's checklist when the order is created, again the moment it leaves the Quote stage, 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.

There was a fourth cause until recently, and it matters if you renamed your to-dos to match your own language. MonuDesk used to recognise its built-in to-dos by their name, so renaming one, say Payment to Deposits, meant MonuDesk stopped recognising it and quietly left it off new orders, with nothing anywhere to explain why. That is fixed: a built-in to-do keeps its identity when you rename it, and renames made before the fix were repaired automatically.

One case could not be repaired on its own: a built-in to-do that was both renamed and had its steps changed cannot be matched back to what it started as, so it now behaves like a to-do you created yourself. If a renamed to-do is still not turning up on new orders, open Settings → Order Management → To-Dos, find it, and check whether it is set to be added to new orders.

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 is no longer a quote.

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 / Collapse all at the top of the board to reset everything visible in one click.

"An order vanished off the board"

There are two ways an order leaves the board, and both send it to the Archive button at the top of the board rather than deleting anything.

• Somebody cancelled it. Three-dot menu on the order, Cancel Order. This is immediate and cannot be undone.

• 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 check runs overnight, so an order finished today typically disappears the following morning.

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.

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

"A card changed color"

Two 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 Settings → Order Management → Order Deadline Alerts.

• 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 Settings → Order Management → Quote Price Guarantee.

A card shows one strip at most, and the promise-date banner wins when both apply.

A card that turned amber or red on a date you never promised anyone. Until recently, saving a new quote copied the last day of the installation window into the promise date, whether or not anybody had set one. That invisible promise date is what drove the banner, and clearing it did not work because the next save put it straight back.

That is fixed. Saving a quote no longer copies the end of the installation window into the promise date, and a promise date can now be removed 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. If an old order is still chasing you about a deadline you never gave, 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"

Leaving the Quote stage is the point where a stone comes off your shelf, so MonuDesk asks first. The prompt appears whenever the order leaves Quote, whether somebody dragged the card or a logged payment carried it forward.

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. Stock that already came off the shelf shows an already deducted note instead of asking you twice.

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.

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 moves a card, changes a to-do's state or assigns a to-do, your board updates on its own within a moment. You never need to refresh.

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.

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

• Leaving the Quote stage confirms the order. MonuDesk generates the Invoice, hides the stored Quote PDF from the Customer Portal, syncs to QuickBooks, adds the confirmed-order to-dos and marks Quote Client as done.

• The stock confirmation opens right after an order leaves Quote. 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