The requests inbox

Requests is your booking inbox. Every enquiry someone sends through your booking form arrives here, carrying their brief, their reference images, their contact details and a message thread you can reply in. Nothing goes to your personal email and gets lost behind a receipt.

One request stays with a client the whole way through. It starts as an enquiry, becomes a quote, becomes a booked appointment, and ends up in Completed. You are never copying details from one place to another.

Five tabs run across the top of the page, and each one shows a count so you can see at a glance where the work is.

• •Inbox is everything still in play. New enquiries you have not answered, plus quotes you have sent that the client has not paid yet.
• •Booked is work that is locked in. A request lands here the moment the client pays their deposit, and it leaves the Inbox at the same time so you are never looking at it twice.
• •Completed is finished work, kept for your records and your revenue figures.
• •Waitlist is marked Soon. It is not doing anything yet.
• •Archive holds anything you have shelved, plus everything you declined.

Archiving is separate from status. An archived request keeps whatever it really was, so a completed job you archive still counts towards your revenue. Archive is inbox tidying, not deletion. See declining and archiving.

The Inbox tab splits itself into two groups so the things that need you sit at the top.

New is anything still waiting on you, whether you have opened it or not. This is also what lights the dot on your sidebar. Approved is everything you have already quoted and are waiting on the client for.

If a client edits their request after you have quoted them, it jumps back to New and wears an Updated tag showing exactly what changed. Their payment is held until you look at it, so nobody pays for the wrong piece.

Every request carries a status badge. Hover it and you get a one-line explanation, but here is the whole set.

• •New: the client has sent it and is waiting on you.
• •Approved: you have sent a quote with pricing and appointment options. You are waiting for the client to book.
• •Deposit Paid: their money has landed. The date is still to be pinned down.
• •Confirmed: deposit paid and the date is locked in.
• •Completed: the session happened and the final payment is in.
• •Declined and Cancelled: you turned it down, or one of you called it off.

The search box in the header matches on the client's full name, their email address and the title they gave the piece. It searches inside the tab you are on, so if you cannot find someone, check whether their work is already in Booked or Archive.

The filter button opens Filter & Sort. Sort newest or oldest first, and choose whether that means when the request was Created or when it was last Updated. Under Show only you can narrow to Starred, Flash or Event, and under Read status to Unread or Read. A dot on the filter button tells you a filter is still on. Reset clears them.

Tap the star on any row to keep a request handy, then filter to Starred when you want just those. It is the fastest way to hold on to the three pieces you actually want to draw this week.

Click a row to open it. On desktop you get the client's side on the left and your working area on the right, split between Appointment Info and Details. On your phone it opens as a sheet with Details, Images, Messages and Appointment tabs.

Details is everything they sent: the brief in their own words, placement, size, budget, reference images, and any custom questions you added to your form. Booking For tells you what kind of job it is at a glance, whether that is a Custom Design, a Flash Piece or an event you are running.

From here you take the decision. Approve opens the quote builder, covered in approving and taking a deposit. Decline sends a polite no.

Right click a row on desktop, or press and hold it on your phone, for a short menu: Select request, Archive request, and Delete request once something is already archived.

Select request puts the list into selection mode so you can tick several and then Star, Archive or Delete the lot in one go. Deleting is only ever offered on requests you have archived first, so you cannot wipe a live enquiry by accident.

New to this and want a walk through? The ellipsis menu in the header has Show me around, which runs a sample request through the whole approve flow without sending anything to anyone.