Your customer wants to check on a repair without signing in

The flow

Send them to yourshop.benchworks.app/portal. Tell them to use the "Look up a repair" tab. They type the ticket reference (TKT-202605-001 or whatever you gave them) and the last 4 digits of the phone number they gave you. Hit Look up.

If both match a ticket, we send them a signed URL that takes them straight to the ticket page. The URL is good for 30 days — they can bookmark it and come back any time without re-typing.

What they see

The same ticket page a signed-in customer would see — current status, the activity timeline of customer-visible notes and status changes, links to any estimate or invoice attached to the ticket. They can approve estimates, pay invoices, download PDFs, all without an account.

Why we offer both

Some customers want an account so they can see everything they’ve ever had repaired. Some customers just want to check if their thing is ready. We don’t force a choice — both flows work, side by side. The signed-URL flow has been around since week 9; the OTP portal landed in week 29.

If the lookup fails

We always show the same generic "Check your reference and phone number" message — never anything like "reference not found" or "phone matches but ticket doesn’t". That’s on purpose: it stops someone from probing the system to find out whose phone number ends in 1234.