Fieldstone's records desk

Fieldstone is a fictional name for a real company, and every screen on this page shows sample data.

Its sales desk works from records. A new batch arrives every week, far more than a small team can read line by line, and most of it is not worth a call. The desk needed one place where the week lands already in order.

So every record takes the same short set of fields: a reference, a date, a region, a category, a scope, a size and a contact. Nothing is retyped, and nothing lives in a spreadsheet on one person's laptop.

Sorting is the real work. The desk narrows the week by region, by category, by stage and by whether a record is new. Each filter is a chip, and every chip that is on narrows the table further.

Some people should never get a call. The do-not-contact list is applied before a list is built, duplicates are folded into one row, and any single record can be left out by hand. A record that is left out stays on the screen, struck through, so nobody wonders where it went.

The week ends in a list. The button that builds it stays locked until the checks are ticked, and it shows how many records it will take before anyone presses it. Once it is built, the list is the sales team's work for the week.

The dashboard is the same week from above: what is new, what has been approved, what is on the list and what changed. Under the tiles sits the week day by day, then the short list of records that need a person to look.

Records keep moving after the list is built. One is approved, another changes size or moves to a different lane. Each change becomes an alert, and the person on the desk marks it seen or handled, from a phone if that is where they are.

The week now starts with a sorted list, and a change to a record reaches the desk the day it happens.