Creating tickets

Every repair in BenchKey is a ticket. There are four ways one gets created, and they all land in the same queue.

A ticket opened from the queue: the conversation, the details, and an invoice built in the drawer. Recorded from the real app with demo data.

The four intake paths

1. Walk-in check-in, the front-counter flow (or customer-facing kiosk) collects contact info, device, and problem, then creates the customer and the ticket in one pass. See Check-in & kiosk.
2. Appointment, an online booking converts to a ticket at drop-off, carrying the customer and device details from the booking.
3. Mail-in form, the public intake form on your website creates the ticket before the package arrives.
4. Lead conversion, a website lead converts to a ticket in one click, with the conversation history attached.

You can also create a ticket manually from the queue for anything that doesn’t fit the above.

What a ticket carries

• Customer, matched by phone/email so returning customers keep one record and one history
• Device, what’s on the bench, with serial/identifiers as your intake form defines
• Status, where the job is in your workflow; drives the portal timeline and automations
• Assignment & due date, whose bench, promised when
• Notes & photos, with per-item visibility: internal by default, customer-visible when you choose
• Messages, the email/SMS thread for this repair
• Money, estimates, invoices, and payments for this job

Customer deduplication

Intake matches customers by phone and email. A returning customer’s new ticket attaches to their existing record, history intact, no duplicate “John Smith (2)”.

Labels

If printing is connected, the device label prints automatically when the ticket is created at check-in. Any ticket can reprint its label on demand.