---
title: "Working with Records"
description: "Every list opens onto a record: one page that reads like a receipt, with its lines beside it and the road it travels along the bottom."
---
> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.beelocity.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Working with Records
A list shows you many things at once; a record shows you one. Open a quotation, a supplier, a work
order or a meter reading and the page is laid out the same way and behaves the same way every
time, so this page is worth reading once — the module chapters assume it rather than repeat it.
## Creating a record
The black button at the right of a list's top edge reads **New**. It never spells out what it is
about to create and never wears a `+`: the heading above the list and the entry in the sidebar
have both just said what you are looking at, and the button only has to carry the verb. The
[command palette](command-palette.html) is the other way in — press **Ctrl+K**, type *new*, and
the documents you are allowed to create are listed by name.
A blank record opens with the form already open, so you can start typing straight away. The bar
across the top reads **Sales quotations › New** — the bare word, because the name beside it has
just said what is being created.
A blank record shows the record and nothing else. Its lines, its other tabs and the road along the
bottom appear only once it has been saved, and for the same reason in each case: there is nothing
to hang a line on until there is a document to hang it on.
## The number the form suggests
A document opens with its number already filled in — the next one in its series, asked of the
server as the form opens, so a quotation offers `QT-2026-000042` after `QT-2026-000041`.
**It is a suggestion, not a reservation.** Nothing is set aside for you while you type. If a
colleague starts a quotation at the same moment, they are shown the same number, and whichever of
you saves second is the one who has to change it. That is the fact worth carrying away from this
page, because it is the one that surprises people.
The field is yours from the start. Type your own number over the suggestion and it stays typed —
an answer arriving from the server a moment later never writes over what you have put there. Where
the series depends on a choice you make — a treasury entry is numbered as a receipt or as a
payment, and the two count separately — changing that choice swaps the suggestion for the other
series', and still leaves a number you typed alone.
## When the number is already taken
Save a document whose number somebody already has and the answer appears **under the number
field**, where the wrong value is: *That number is already taken — pick another, or take the
suggested one.* Nothing was created, you are still on the same form with everything else you
filled in, and the number is the only thing to change.
A required field you left empty is answered the same way — one sentence under the field, the page
unmoved, nothing sent until every one of them has been answered.
## Saving, and where you land
**Save** writes the record and takes you to its own page: the same page you would have reached by
clicking it in the list, now with its lines, its tabs and its road. The blank form is not left
behind you, so **Back** returns you to the list rather than to a form you have already filled in
and sent.
**Cancel** on a blank record goes back to the list and creates nothing.
## Reading a record
**A record reads like a receipt.** Its fields are one narrow column, each label paired with its
value on a single line and a dotted line carrying your eye across, so you can run down it the way
you read a till slip. Anything that comes in quantities — a quotation's items, an order's lines, a
receipt's goods — sits **beside** that column rather than behind a tab, so a total and the lines
that make it up are on screen together. On a narrow screen the two stack, the record first.
The lines are a table like any other, with the same edge controls a list has — a search box, a
filter, a column chooser and its own **ⓘ** explaining what each column holds. **Add** starts a new
line, and each line saves itself as you fill it in: leave a cell and the row is written, so there
is no second Save to remember. A line still missing something it cannot do without keeps being
refused, with a message saying what, until the last cell lands. **Tab** and **Enter** move you
along the row, and **Enter** on the last cell of the last line starts another one.
At the end of the receipt, **Created and updated** shows when the record was first written and
when it last changed. Records that carry more than one kind of thing put the rest behind **tabs**
beside *Overview* — a partner's addresses and contacts, a maintenance plan's tasks. The tab you are
on is written into the page's address, so a link you send a colleague opens where you were.
## The road a document travels
**Along the bottom, a document shows the road it travels.** The steps run left to right — *Draft*,
*Sent*, *Accepted* — with the ones behind it ticked, the one it is on written in bold, and the
rest waiting. When the next step is one you can take, it is written to be clicked. Rest on any
step and it tells you when the document reached it and who moved it there; a step the rule moved
by itself says when without a name.
Click the current step to open the whole picture: every state the document can reach, every move
between them, and who made each move and when. This is also where the moves that leave the road
are taken — rejecting, cancelling, revising. Documents that go around a step show it greyed and
struck from their path, so you can see at a glance that it was skipped rather than missed.
## Editing a record
A record's page ends the way a list does. At the bottom, beside its tabs, there is one main
button, **Edit**, and a **More actions** button (three dots) holding everything else — printing
and downloading a document, the steps it goes through, and **Delete** last, after a separator, so
it is never the button next to the one you meant. While you are editing, the two buttons are
**Save** and **Cancel**; a record you can no longer edit keeps only **More actions**.
**Delete** asks first, and says plainly that it cannot be undone. Confirm and you land back on the
list the record was on.
Printing is in **More actions** on every document that has a printed form, and it asks which
language to print in before it acts. [Printing and Sharing Documents](printing-documents.html) is
the whole of that.
## When somebody else saved first
Two people can have the same record open, and sooner or later two people will. If a colleague saves
while you are still editing, your **Save** does not go through and quietly undo their work — it
stops and says so: *Somebody else changed this record. It has been refreshed — check your edits and
save again.*
Nothing you typed is lost. The page has quietly caught up to what is now stored, your own changes
are still in the form where you left them, and pressing **Save** a second time writes them onto the
record as it now stands. If the two of you changed different things, both survive; if you changed
the same field, yours wins — but only because you chose to, having been told.
## Leaving with unsaved changes
Start editing, change something and then leave the page — the sidebar, the bar across the top, the
browser's own Back — and Beelocity stops you first: **Unsaved changes**, *You have unsaved
changes. Are you sure you want to leave this page?*, with **Stay** and **Leave**. **Stay** puts you
back where you were with your edits intact; **Leave** goes on and drops them.
Moving between the record's own tabs is not leaving, so it never asks.
## A record that is not there
Follow a link to a record that has since been deleted and the page says so — *This record could
not be found — it may have been deleted* — with a way back to its list, which is the only useful
thing to offer. A record your role does not let you open says that instead, in the same words the
app uses anywhere you are refused a page.
Source: https://docs.beelocity.com/en/getting-started/the-record-page/index.mdx