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The life of a repair

“Made safe”, “waiting for parts” and “handed over” are shown alongside the status; they are not statuses of their own.
1

Triage

A new repair arrives from the repairs desk or is raised by staff. AI suggests its category and urgency; a person confirms them. Damp and mould reports are flagged for a person to decide whether there is a hazard.
2

Decide who deals with it

Most repairs go to a contractor. Some belong elsewhere: hand them over to the landlord, an insurer, a block manager or a warranty provider, with a follow-up task so it is not forgotten. For gas, carbon monoxide, electrical fire and flood, SortX shows fixed safety steps to give the tenant.
3

Get a contractor

Assign a contractor yourself, or send the job as offers: SortX offers it to your contractors for that trade and area in your order, one at a time. The first to accept takes it. An offer nobody answers moves on to the next contractor; if no one is left, you get a task. Contractors whose insurance or registrations have expired are refused unless a person overrides it with a reason.
4

Quote and approval

Record a quote, or ask one or more contractors to quote through their portal. If the cost is over the landlord’s spend limit, the job waits for approval. Send the landlord an approval link from the repair page: they approve or decline from the email without signing in. They can also decide in their portal, or you record the approval they gave you.
5

Visits

The contractor reports from their portal when they are on their way, have arrived, are running late or could not get in, and the tenant hears about it. Each visit ends with one outcome: fixed, made safe, part fixed, not fixed, could not get in, or contractor did not attend. Anything other than “fixed” returns the repair to the same contractor with a task to book the next visit.
6

Close

Close the repair with one of the fixed close reasons (a reason is required unless the work is done). A duplicate is linked to the repair it duplicates. A repair cannot close while its invoice is received or disputed; see Contractor invoices. SortX never closes a repair by itself.
Throughout, the tenant is kept told and anything that goes quiet is chased: see Updates and chasing.

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Emergencies out of hours

With on call turned on (Settings → Repairs → On call: your office hours, the rota and how long someone has to respond), an emergency reported outside office hours pages the person on call by text and email. The page has a link to take the emergency without signing in. If nobody takes it in time, SortX pages the next person, then the agency’s owners, and then raises a task. On call is off until you set it up.

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Hazard clocks

When a person decides a report is a hazard, SortX starts its clock and shows the deadlines on Today; staff record each milestone. Private agencies see these as best-practice targets; for social landlords they are labelled as Awaab’s Law deadlines. Set them in Settings → Repairs → Hazard clocks. This is a tool for meeting your duties, not legal advice.