Internal note vs customer note on a service

Every service carries two descriptions — a private one for whoever is building the estimate, and a plain-English one the customer reads under that line on the portal.

What it is

The old single description was doing two jobs. The internal description stays what it always was — crew instructions and pricing cautions, never leaving the building. The customer description is the line a buyer reads when they tap Details: 'Four inches of 4,000 PSI concrete over compacted gravel, with fibre reinforcement and a broom finish.'

Also called: customer facing description · note to the crew · line item description · details button

See it
Internal note vs customer note on a service
🔒ridgelinepostframe.com/project/servic699
Hobby Shop
Framing · on schedule
The catalog editor showing Internal description and Customer-facing description as two labelled fields, next to the portal line with its Details disclosure open. Sample data — no customer information appears here.
How it works
  1. 1Both fields are edited on the catalog row in Settings.
  2. 2The customer note is opted into one service at a time — most rows have none.
  3. 3When an estimate is frozen into a snapshot, every line's customer note is filled in from the catalog, so the public portal needs no access to org-scoped tables.
  4. 4The customer note freezes at add time, the same rule the rate follows.
Why we built it

The note on a service was written for whoever was building the estimate — use the 6-bag mix, quote high, this one always goes long — and was never meant to leave the building. There was nowhere to write the plain-English line the customer should read under that service on their own copy. Each service now carries both: a private note for staff, and a customer-facing one that prints on the portal.

The problem
  • One description field carrying both crew instructions and customer-safe wording
  • A price on a line with nothing explaining what it buys
Sound familiar?
What you get
Internal cautions stay internal, by construction
The line that provokes a question answers it
The portal reads a self-contained snapshot — no live lookups into private tables

See it on your own jobs

Twenty minutes, your numbers, no slide deck. We’ll build one of your real buildings in front of you and send you the estimate link at the end — yours to keep either way.

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