Understanding the pipeline

The pipeline is the mental model behind everything in ImportOps. Once you understand it, the Dashboard, Vehicles list, Pipeline board, and Workshop all make sense as different lenses on the same data.

The idea

Every vehicle you manage moves through a sequence of stages from acquisition to delivery. ImportOps tracks that journey automatically. As you add data (a shipment is assigned, a vehicle lands, a workshop task is completed, a customer pays), the vehicle's stage changes to match.

Stages are the unit ImportOps uses for filtering, reporting, and showing "what's going on right now" at a glance.

The journey, in plain language

The exact mechanics vary across businesses, but most vehicles move through a version of this:

• Acquired: you've bought or committed to buy a vehicle at its origin
• On its way: it's at sea or in transit
• Arrived: it's landed and going through customs and compliance
• In the workshop: your team is inspecting, repairing, detailing, and preparing it for sale
• Sale ready: prep is complete; it's available to reserve or sell
• Reserved or sold: a customer has committed, or paid in full
• Delivered: it's left your possession

This is a simplified view. Each vehicle actually has several status dimensions working together:

• A commercial status: is it owned, reserved, sold, or delivered?
• A logistics status: where is it physically?
• A workshop / prep status: is the prep finished?

The stage labels you see in lists and on the Dashboard combine these into a single readable pill. A vehicle that's arrived at your port but hasn't started workshop prep yet shows one label; a vehicle that's in the workshop with a customer already reserved shows another.

More of the detail (exact stage names, colours, filtering nuances) is covered in the Vehicles & Pipeline category.

Where to see the pipeline

Three different views of the same underlying data:

• Dashboard → Pipeline Overview: a horizontal summary with counts and recent vehicles per stage. Best for a "how are we doing right now" read.
• Pipeline (sidebar): a full board view where each column is a stage. Best for seeing work flow across the whole business and spotting backlogs.
• Vehicles (sidebar): the flat list with stage filters. Best when you need to search, sort, or export.

Pick the view that matches the question you're asking.

How stages change

Mostly as a by-product of the data you're already entering.

• Adding shipping details on a vehicle moves it from Acquired into On its way
• Marking a shipment as arrived bumps all its vehicles forward
• Completing the workshop tasks on a vehicle marks it Sale ready
• Linking a customer and recording a payment shifts it into Reserved or Sold

A few transitions are explicit buttons, but most happen quietly once you've captured the data in the natural place for the work. You don't have to keep the stage in sync yourself; that's what the pipeline is for.

The one rule that matters

You capture the data once, in the section that's natural for the work (Shipments, Workshop, Customers, Documents), and ImportOps reflects the vehicle's current stage everywhere else. That's the whole model.

Once that clicks, the rest of the app is straightforward.