Logging your first snag

A snag in Rectify is a defect with three things attached to it: a photo, a note, and the people who own putting it right. Get those three down and the snag is logged. Everything after that happens on the snag itself.

What goes on a snag

A photo. Taken on site, at the defect. This is the record, and it is what makes the snag legible to someone who was not standing where you were.

A note. What is wrong, in as many words as it takes. Enough that the person picking it up does not have to come and ask you.

Assignees. The people who own putting the defect right until it is resolved. Usually that is one trade, but a snag can be assigned to more than one person when the work needs it, and everyone running the project can see whose it is.

The point of doing all three at the time is that the snag is complete before you have walked to the next room. There is no second pass where you sit down and write up what you saw.

Who the assignees are

An assignee is a person you hand the snag to, by name. Assign the people who are actually doing the work: a snag that belongs to everybody belongs to nobody, and the open list stops meaning anything.

Assignees do not have to be people on your team, and they do not consume a seat in the way a team member does. Free allows up to five assignees across your organisation, and Team and Pro have no limit. See Assignee limit reached for what counts.

What happens next

Assignees update the snag directly. Their photos, their notes, and the status change all land on that snag rather than arriving as a separate message you have to match back to what you sent.

There is no thread of replies to reconcile against the list, and nothing to re-type from an email into a spreadsheet, because the update was made against the snag in the first place.

Resolved is not closed

Finishing a snag takes two people, on purpose.

When the work is done, an assignee marks the snag resolved. That is as far as it goes on their side: an assignee cannot close a snag, and cannot sign off their own work.

Closing it is your organisation’s decision. Any full member of your organisation can check the work against what was logged and close the snag. Assignees cannot, including the one who did the work. Until someone closes it, the snag is resolved but not finished.

The effect is that nothing leaves your list on the strength of an assignee’s word alone. Resolved means “I have done it”; closed means “we agree it is done”. The photos from both stages stay on the snag.

If the work isn’t right, don’t close it: send it back. Any member can return a resolved snag to In Progress, with a reason the assignee sees on the snag.

The snag lifecycle covers every status a snag moves through, who can change it, and how sending a snag back works.

Finding it again

Every snag is filed by project, by assignee and by status, so the open list is always a live view rather than something you maintain. The owner and members also have Reports, which read from the same data:

• All Snags is every snag across your projects, whatever its status
• Outstanding is everything not yet closed, including resolved snags still waiting to be signed off
• Overdue is snags past their due date and not yet resolved
• Closed is the snags that have been signed off
• Extras is snags marked as out-of-scope work
• KPIs is the key measures across your organisation

The lists can be filtered by project, status or assignee, and exported as a CSV. KPIs exports as a PDF or a CSV.

If something looks wrong

If a snag is not showing where you expect, or an assignee’s update has not appeared, tell us what you were doing and what happened instead. Screenshots help.