Price the known work.
Leave the unknown visible.

Begin with the piece already in your care.

A repair planning estimate starts from an existing customer-owned repair job. It does not create a resale-stock item or attach an asking price to the customer's ring. The operator reviews the current received or in-progress job and explicitly adopts that source before saving a new planning record.

The source preserves the recorded intake, customer name as stated at intake, work-stage view and verified event history. It does not pull later contact details from the customer directory or rewrite the original name because the current profile changed. The saved estimate explains which job and stage informed the planning decision.

Refreshing the job source does not replace the working lines. If another employee advances the job before a new save, the old source cannot silently become the new basis. The operator keeps the lines and reviews the current job deliberately. Ready and returned jobs remain readable as historical context, but do not accept a new planning estimate in this slice.

The labor can be known while the part is still uncertain.

Consider a hypothetical ring received for a resize and a setting check. The operator can enter a labor line, “Resize work,” with a manual total of USD45.00. A second parts line describes a possible replacement component, but the amount stays unknown until the required part is established.

The known subtotal is USD45.00 and the unpriced-line count is one. The recorded scope subtotal remains unavailable. The software does not turn the unknown part into zero, add a guessed allowance or label45.00 as the price of all the work. A visible gap is useful information for the next discussion.

Explicit zero is different. If a whole line is intentionally entered as0.00, it is a known zero amount and counts as priced. That statement still needs a meaningful description and the operator's scope review. It is not the same as an empty amount, a missing part price or an approval for free work.

The example amounts are illustrative assumptions. The application supplies no market rate, cost benchmark, labor-time recommendation or margin calculation. Staff enter the planning totals they mean to record and retain their explanatory note.

A line amount is the total for that line.

A planning estimate contains one to twenty explicitly entered parts, labor, service or other lines. Each has a description and an optional exact-decimal amount. There is no quantity, unit price, hourly rate or automatic multiplication hidden behind the input. If a line describes two tasks, the entered amount covers that entire line as described.

For more clarity, make separate lines for work that may be priced independently. Keep “labor to resize” distinct from “replacement component” if one is known and the other is not. The line category helps read the plan; it is not a cost-accounting posting, purchased-parts record or external bench instruction.

Choose USD or EUR explicitly and review it against the current store's checked currency. A saved USD record stays USD if the store configuration later changes. New records do not perform conversion or relabel an old amount, and no asking price, cost basis or earlier estimate is copied into the working form.

All amounts use exact cents, up to the supported per-line limit, and the recorded arithmetic is a sum of known whole-line amounts. Unknown lines remain counted. The scope declaration asks the operator to acknowledge these line-total and tax boundaries before saving.

A fully priced scope is still not a final bill.

Now consider a second hypothetical plan with labor45.00, parts18.50 and a service line12.00, all in the same explicitly selected currency. The known subtotal is75.50, no line is unpriced and the recorded scope subtotal is75.50. An explicitly priced zero would leave that arithmetic unchanged while remaining a known line.

Taxes are always excluded and unassessed in this workflow. The subtotal does not determine whether tax applies or how much would be due. There is no tax engine, final payable amount, invoice, deposit, tender, payment collection or customer balance.

Saving a plan also does not establish customer approval or permission to start work. It creates no accepted quotation, signature or authorization event and does not move the custody job to in progress, ready or returned. Use your separate review and authorization process; the planning record explains assumptions without substituting for it.

Read what was planned, even after the job moves on.

Saved planning estimates are independent immutable originals. The recent twenty summaries have an explicit boundary, and an older authorized record can be opened directly. The list is not a family of quote revisions, an authoritative latest price or an automatically accepted replacement for a previous plan.

A saved original retains its complete job source, manual lines, currency, exact outputs, operator and recording time. Later ready or returned events, a current customer edit or unavailable current job do not rewrite that original. Historical access remains scoped to its recording store and authorization.

An interrupted response keeps the exact original request on the mounted page. Checking that request comes before an explicit identical retry. Editing the next line or selecting an older estimate does not replace an uncertain request. A confirmed original and the last checked current job remain separate views.

This recovery works while the workspace stays mounted; it is not offline storage or hard-reload recovery. There is no automatic retry, automatic first saved selection or automatic new estimate when the source changes. A deliberate separate request after a known outcome retains working lines and requires a new source review.

Evaluate the partial estimate before the easy one.

Bring a repair with known labor and an unknown part, then try explicit zero, a fractional-cent amount and a second employee advancing the job. Check that the missing amount remains visible, unsupported precision rejects without losing lines, and an old reviewed source cannot overwrite newer custody evidence.

Keep the broader service workflow in view. Parts purchasing, external bench custody, work scheduling, customer quotation delivery, approval, tax, invoicing, payment, correction/reissue and export remain unfinished. This planning record does not imply full repair-service or Bravo feature parity.

Read the repair-custody guide for the operational stages and records and controls for original evidence boundaries. For a shop-owned piece's resale assumptions, use the separate resale-decision workflow; a repair planning estimate does not borrow its melt basis or values.