The whole app, in the order you would meet it. Nothing here is a rule — it is what each screen is for and what it does when you press things.
The app lives at stagingplan.com. Open it in Safari or Chrome and sign in with your email and password. You stay signed in for a month, so on your own phone this is a once-a-month thing.
Worth two minutes. In Safari, tap the share button and choose Add to Home Screen. It then opens like an app, full screen, with no address bar eating the top of the page.
Tap your name, top right. Open the app on sets where you land — Capture if you spend the day photographing, Jobs if you spend it quoting. It follows your login, not the phone, so it is the same on every device.
Beside your name. Turn it on and every screen explains its own buttons where they sit. Turn it off when you no longer need it — it stays as you left it.
One idea runs through this whole screen: the photograph creates the record. You never fill in a form to make a piece exist. You photograph it, and it exists.
A name is all a piece needs to stop being a draft. Category, colour, rate, dimensions and where it lives can all wait, and the app will keep asking until they are filled in.
The two buttons at the bottom of a draft do different jobs. Save writes the details and moves the piece into the collection. Later writes the details too and leaves it in drafts — for a piece you have half written up, a price you want to check, a colour you want to see in daylight. Closing the sheet any other way does the same as Later, so nothing you type is ever lost.
On a piece that is already in the collection the left button says Cancel, and that one really does throw your changes away. It is there so you can back out of an edit you did not mean to make.
Six identical dining chairs are one record with a quantity of six, not six records. Different colour or different fabric means a separate record — that is the line.
As you type a name the app looks for one it already has, and offers to bump that one's quantity instead of making a second row. Take the offer. It also compares the photograph against everything it has seen, so a piece you shot twenty minutes ago is recognised before you have typed anything.
Photographs are saved on the phone first and sent afterwards. A number appears saying how many are waiting. They go up on their own when you have a connection again, and it is safe to close the app in the meantime — they are not lost.
The Inventory tab is everything Finer owns. The search box reads everything written on a piece — name, notes, fabric or finish, where it lives, who it came from, its category and its colour — and a bare number finds that reference number. Or use Filter for category, colour, and what is free between two dates. Whatever you have narrowed it to is listed as chips underneath — tap a chip to drop that filter.
The grid is for choosing furniture: big pictures, eight to a screen. The list is for working through a stocklist: small pictures, forty to a screen, with the quantity down the right. Swap between them at the top.
Every piece says where it is under its name — in the warehouse, or at an address with the date it comes back. If you set a date range in the filter, it answers for those dates instead: what is free the week you are quoting.
Open the piece and change the number. Every change is logged with who made it, so "we had four of those" is answerable later.
At the bottom of a piece, under Where it came from, are the supplier, the date, what you paid and the RRP. Fill in the last two and the sheet works out how far under retail you bought it — which is the point of keeping both.
The two boxes disagree about GST on purpose, and the labels say which is which. What it cost is ex GST, like every other price in the app — it comes off an invoice. RRP is inc GST — it comes off a shop ticket, so type the number as it is written on the label and the ex figure underneath is worked out for you. None of this is ever shown to a vendor.
A job is a property. It starts as an address and a date, and grows from there.
Jobs tab → New job. The address, the suburb, the install date, and who sent you the work. Start typing an address and it suggests real ones. A new job arrives with the rooms most houses have — you can add, rename or delete them.
Every room has its own Add here. It offers what is free for that job's dates and says how many, so you cannot promise a sofa that is out. Pieces can be dragged between rooms by the handle on the left, or moved with the little room dropdown on each line.
Edit → Package (ex GST). That one number is what the vendor sees. Under it, Work it out from will fill the box with what the pieces come to at list rates, or with a package's price, if you would rather start from one of those. It fills the box once and then leaves it alone.
There is no Confirm button. Sending a proposal holds the furniture for seven days, and the vendor signing it is what confirms the job.
A package is a saved set of furniture — a whole property, or one room — that goes onto a new job in one tap.
On a job: Packages → pick one → it shows you the plan before anything happens. Each line says whether it is the saved piece, a swap because the original is out, or something it could not fill at all. Nothing is on the job until you press the button at the bottom.
A line it cannot fill is simply skipped — you do not have to deal with it to carry on. Choose one is there if you would rather substitute something yourself.
The best packages come from jobs that went well, not from the catalogue. On a finished job, save the whole thing, or save a single room. Both keep the pieces, the rooms and the price.
On the job: Proposal. It is built from what is on the job right then — the rooms, the pieces, the photographs, the price, and the front of the house if somebody photographed it on the first visit. Read it before you send it; the preview is what the vendor gets.
Sending emails the vendor a link and attaches a PDF. Two things happen at that moment, and they matter:
They fill in their name and email on the page and tick to accept. Then, on its own: the furniture is committed for the whole hire, the job becomes Confirmed, it appears on the invoicing list, they get a receipt with the signed PDF, and you get an email saying who signed, what it came to, when it installs, which rooms, and who sent you the work.
If something on the job changes after you have sent it, the app offers to start a new version rather than editing what they are reading. Send the new one and the old link stops working.
The Invoicing tab is the list of jobs with money outstanding, and the number on the tab is how many need something doing.
Raise the invoice, record payments against it as they arrive, and void one that is wrong — a void asks you to say why, and the reason stays on the record.
When a vendor wants a few more weeks, press Extend on the job. That starts a second job at the same address, with the same rooms and the same furniture, beginning the day after the current term ends.
It is its own job with its own number, proposal, signature and invoice. The current one does not change until the vendor signs the new one.
If a piece has been promised to somebody else in the new dates, the app says so by name rather than refusing the whole extension. That piece stays behind, which means somebody has to go and collect it on the day — the job says so on its face, and so does the signing email.
A term finishing within three days goes to the top of the Jobs list. That is the moment to either book the collection or offer another few weeks, while there is still time to get a signature.
Every job has Who sent us this. Type two letters of a name or an agency and pick from the list; if they are not on it, the last option adds them without leaving the job. Leave it empty for a walk-in.
It is worth thirty seconds every time, because it is the only thing that makes the next part true.
Your name → Open the stats → Where the work comes from. Every agent Finer knows, ranked by how much work they have sent, with everybody from Gaby's phone who has never sent anything listed underneath. Tap a name to see their properties.
That second list is the useful one. It is who to ring.
This is almost never your connection. Email [email protected] and we will put it right — it is a one-minute fix at our end.
Pull down to refresh, or close and reopen the app. If it persists, check the small build code beside the stagingplan. logo — if yours does not match the others', your phone is holding an old copy.
Open it and read the history at the bottom: every move, every quantity change, who did it and when. That normally answers it.
Take a screenshot and send it. The screenshot is worth more than a description, because it carries the build code and the exact wording.
StagingPlan — internal. This page describes the app, not what Finer promises a client. If something here disagrees with what the app actually does, the app is right and this page is out of date: say so and it gets fixed.