Job Packages
A job package is the polished deliverable you give a customer after a job: a before/after photo gallery, the invoice, and any care documents, all presented through their portal. This is one of DetailByte's signature touches.
Building a package
From a completed booking, click Create Package to open the package builder. Here you can:
- Upload before and after photos, organised by stage.
- Attach the invoice.
- Add documents: for example a care guide or service letter.
- Apply your watermark to photos automatically.
Photos are resized and watermarked for you as they upload, so a full set of phone photos becomes a tidy gallery without any editing on your part.
Photos alone are enough. The invoice and documents are both optional.
"Invoice" here is the manual upload slot: attach any PDF or image as the job's invoice document. If you use the real Invoicing module, its generated PDF fills this slot automatically; the manual upload is the fallback for anything invoicing doesn't cover.
Service letters
You can prepare reusable service letters/documents per service (Settings → Customer Programs → Job Packages), optionally with a friendly display name, so the right document can be dropped into a package quickly.
Watermark
Upload your watermark image (a transparent PNG works best) under Settings → Customer Programs → Job Packages. It is applied to package photos so your brand travels with every image the customer downloads or shares.
Delivering the package
When the package is ready, sending it:
- Delivers the thank-you email to the customer.
- Gives them portal access to their gallery for a configurable number of days.
- Marks the booking's package as sent.
The customer opens the gallery from their portal (or the link in the email) to view and download their photos, invoice and documents, the whole set is downloadable as a ZIP.
Access window
Set how many days the gallery stays accessible after sending under Settings → Customer Programs → Job Packages (counted from when the package is sent, not when it was built). The default is 30 days.
How long the photos are kept
When the access window ends the customer can no longer open the gallery, and a short while after that the photo files are deleted to free storage. The gap between the two is Then delete the photos after (days), in the same settings panel: 7 days by default, and 14 at most.
So on the defaults, photos live for 37 days from sending: 30 days visible to the customer, then 7 days held back.
You are warned before anything is deleted. The day a gallery expires you get a notification naming the exact date its photos will go, with a link straight to the package. If you keep your own copies you can ignore it; if you don't, that is the moment to download the set.
The booking is never deleted, only the image files. The job, its invoice total, the customer's history and everything that feeds their spend and loyalty stay exactly as they were. What goes is the photographs, which are far and away the largest thing on the system, and that is what keeps the storage allowance on your plan generous.
Setting the delete window to 0 keeps every photo indefinitely. Storage then only ever grows, so watch your plan's allowance if you do that.
The gallery link variable
The {booking_gallery_link} variable used in the thank-you template automatically points to the customer's package gallery. You don't need to paste links manually. DetailByte fills it in.
Tips
- Take a consistent set of before shots at the start of the job and matching after shots at the end: the contrast is what makes packages impressive.
- Shoot from the same angle and distance for each pair. A matched pair sells the work; a mismatched one just looks like two photos.
- Shoot at whatever quality your phone is set to: DetailByte resizes and compresses each photo when you upload it, so a 12-megapixel original doesn't sit on your storage allowance at 12 megapixels. Very large files still take longer to upload, so on a weak signal it is worth doing the batch when you are back on wi-fi.