Commerce Beginner

Customer order tracker — the no-login progress link

Share one link and your customer can follow live production progress without an account, and without seeing prices, contacts or internal notes.

7 min read Sales, Production Manager Updated August 2026

Section 01

What the tracker is for

1 minute

Customers ask "where is my order?" because they have no way of finding out. Answering costs someone ten minutes: check the works order, check the schedule, write a careful reply that does not promise too much.

The order tracker replaces that with a link. You share it once, and the customer can look whenever they like — without an account, without a login, and without seeing anything commercial. What they see is generated live from your production data at the moment they open it.

  • One link per sales order, shared by whoever handles that order
  • Shows progress across every works order on that sales order, plus an expected ready date
  • Carries no prices, no contact details, no internal notes and no staff or supplier names
It only works if the shop floor is honest

The bar moves when operators complete operations. If your team records progress a day late, your customer sees yesterday's truth — and they are now watching. Most firms find this is the feature that finally makes operation recording stick.

Section 02

Sharing the link

2 minutes

Navigate toSales Ordersthe orderShare Tracker

Open the sales order and press Share Tracker. A box appears with the link already in it — click the field to select it, copy, and paste it into your reply to the customer.

  • Pressing it twice is safe. If the order already has a valid link, you get the same one back rather than a second link. You cannot accidentally scatter half a dozen live URLs for one order.
  • Not everyone sees the button. It appears only for the company owner and for staff in a group with permission to change sales orders — sharing production progress outside the company is a commercial decision, so it follows the same permission as editing the order.
  • The link is the credential. Anyone holding it can open the page, so treat it like the order acknowledgement itself: fine to email to your customer, not something to post publicly.
For example

Acme orders 40 brackets on SO-1042. You press Share Tracker once and paste the link into your order acknowledgement email. Three weeks later Acme's buyer checks it twice in one afternoon instead of phoning — and you never knew, because it needs nothing from you.

Section 03

What the customer sees

2 minutes

A single page headed Production Tracker, carrying your company name and their order reference.

What they seeWhere it comes from
Order referenceThe sales order reference they already have on your paperwork.
StatusA friendly relabelling of the order status — "Order received", "In production", "Completed" or "Cancelled". Your internal wording never leaks out.
Overall progressThe average progress across the order's works orders. See the next section.
Ready aroundThe order's planned despatch date. If none is set, the latest works-order due date is used instead.
Production itemsOne row per works order: its name, a stage such as "On step 3 of 4", its own progress bar and its due date.
Steps are counted, not named

The customer sees "On step 3 of 4" — never the operation names. Your process is not on display; only how far through it you are. Works orders that have not started show "Not yet started", and finished ones show "All steps complete".

Section 04

How the percentage is worked out

2 minutes

Worth understanding, because customers will ask why a number moved — or did not.

Each works order is measured by its operations. Every completed operation counts as a whole step. The operation currently running counts as a fraction, based on how many units the operator has recorded through it against the works order's target quantity.

Works order: 4 operations, target 40 units 1. Cut Complete = 1 step 2. Drill Complete = 1 step 3. Weld — running 38 of 40 done = 0.95 4. Finish Not started = 0 (1 + 1 + 0.95 + 0) ÷ 4 operations The finished steps, plus how far through the running one 74%

The headline figure at the top of the page is the average of the works-order percentages on that sales order.

  • Cancelled works orders are excluded, so scrapping a job does not drag the customer's number down.
  • Quality inspection jobs are excluded too — they are internal work, and counting them would make progress jump about for reasons the customer cannot see.
  • No operations means no progress. A works order with no operations on it reports zero, however much real work has happened. If a customer says the bar is stuck, that is the first thing to check.
A quantity-free works order moves in jumps

The part-finished fraction needs a target quantity on the works order. Without one, the running operation contributes nothing until it is marked complete — so a four-operation job jumps 0, 25, 50, 75, 100 with nothing in between. Set target quantities and the bar moves smoothly.

Section 05

Safety, expiry and the current limits

2 minutes

The link is public by design, so the protections are worth knowing.

ProtectionWhat it means in practice
Unguessable tokenThe link ends in a random identifier. It cannot be guessed, and it cannot be worked out from the order number.
Expires after 90 daysLinks stop working roughly three months after they are created, and you can withdraw one sooner with Revoke Tracker. A link forwarded on years later is simply dead.
Silent on bad linksAn expired, unknown or withdrawn link returns the same plain "not found" — the page never reveals whether a link ever existed, so it cannot be probed.
Rate limitedRequests from one source are capped per minute, which blunts anyone trying links in bulk.
One order onlyA link reaches exactly one sales order. It is not a door into anything else, and it exposes no way to reach another order.
Withdrawing a link you have shared

Open the sales order and press Revoke Tracker, next to Share Tracker. The link stops working immediately and the customer sees the same plain “not found” page an unknown link gets. The one thing you cannot undo is the withdrawal itself: sharing again issues a different link, so anything the customer already saved or forwarded stays dead.

What the page can never contain

Prices, costs, margins, quantities and line values; your customer's name, address, email or phone; internal notes; and the names of your staff and suppliers. The page is assembled from a fixed list of safe fields rather than by hiding parts of the order, so there is no setting anyone can toggle that would start leaking the rest.

What's next