Job-Work Due Dates: Why Repairs Go Missing and How to Track Them

Published July 17, 2026 · CaratOS

Ask any jeweller how a customer relationship quietly ends, and a surprising number of answers trace back to the same thing: a repair that took too long, with no one following up, until the customer stopped asking and stopped coming back.

The piece wasn't lost. The due date was.

Why due dates slip in the first place

• The due date was never written down, just estimated verbally ("should be ready in a week") and left to memory.
• It was written down somewhere that isn't checked daily — a register page, a sticky note, a message buried in a WhatsApp thread from two weeks ago.
• Nobody owns the follow-up. If a job is "with the karigar," it's easy for both the shop and the karigar to each assume the other is tracking the timeline.

None of these are staff failures — they're the predictable result of tracking due dates in a format that doesn't surface them proactively.

What tracking a due date properly actually requires

A due date isn't useful just because it's recorded — it's useful because something surfaces it before it's missed. That means:

• The due date lives on the job itself, not a separate calendar someone has to remember to cross-reference
• Overdue jobs are visible without a manual search — a shop owner or manager should be able to see what's late at a glance
• The job connects to a customer record, so a follow-up message can go out automatically or with minimal effort

The WhatsApp angle most tracking systems miss

Repairs in jewellery retail are usually promised verbally, at the counter, in the moment — "give us till Friday." A tracking system that requires opening an app after the customer leaves to log that due date adds friction exactly when there's none to spare. Creating the job with the due date directly from a WhatsApp message — the way the conversation with the customer or karigar already happens — closes that gap without asking staff to change how they work.

What good due-date tracking prevents

• Customers who stop returning because a repair took "too long" with no visibility into why
• Karigars getting blamed for delays the shop never actually communicated a deadline for
• Pieces that sit finished, waiting for pickup, with no reminder sent

None of this requires complex software — it requires the due date to be structurally attached to the job, visible without effort, and easy enough to set that it actually gets set every time.