Quality Control lives at Settings → Quality Control (the "Advanced" section of the Settings hub — it's not in the main sidebar, so click the gear icon first, then the Quality Control card). The page has two tabs: QC Gates and Inspections. If you had the old page bookmarked, both `/app/settings/qc-gates` and `/app/settings/inspections` still work — they now redirect you here, landing on the matching tab automatically.
Why these two tabs were merged
QC Gates and Inspections used to be separate settings pages, but they were never really separate features. A gate is a yes/no rule that blocks a send action until something exists; an inspection is the actual record that gets created to satisfy one of those rules. The clearest example is the "Require a signed post-install inspection" gate on the Invoices side — that gate isn't fulfilled by anything on the Gates tab itself. It's fulfilled by a signed row in your inspections, which in turn gets seeded from whichever template you've marked as your shop's default Post-install template on the Inspections tab. Toggle the gate on without ever touching the Inspections tab and it will still technically work — SalesThumb falls back to a built-in default checklist — but you'd have no visibility into what that fallback checklist actually asks your techs to check. Putting both settings on one page with a link between them makes that relationship visible instead of hidden.
The QC Gates tab
This tab has two groups of toggles. Before sending an estimate covers five gates that run the moment you click Send on a quote: requiring a customer email on file, a 17-character VIN on the vehicle, at least one pre-install photo, a state VLT compliance check or signed waiver, and a deposit on the quote. Each toggle includes a one-line "why" explaining the business reason — for example, the VIN gate exists to stop you from quoting the wrong glass and to head off chargeback disputes over which vehicle was serviced.
Before sending a pay link covers four gates on the invoice side: requiring at least one after-install photo, requiring the appointment to be marked COMPLETED, requiring warranty registration, and requiring a signed post-install inspection. These run when you click "Text/Email pay link" on an invoice, and they're enforced server-side too — a blocked send isn't just a UI restriction. The signed-inspection gate is the one with the cross-link: underneath it you'll see "Set up the post-install checklist this gate checks for," which jumps you straight to the Inspections tab.
Toggling any of these doesn't save automatically — changes sit in the form until you click Save QC gates at the bottom of the page. The save bar is sticky, so it stays visible as you scroll through the gate list, and you'll see a green "Saved" confirmation (or a red error message) after you click it.
The Inspections tab
Here you build the actual checklist templates your techs fill out — one library for Pre-install templates and one for Post-install templates, shown side by side. Click New Template to start one: give it a name, pick Pre-install or Post-install, and add checklist items. Each item has a text label plus a default answer state (OK, Issue, or N/A) that's pre-selected when a tech opens the inspection, though they can still change it during the actual walkaround.
The checkbox labeled "Set as default template for pre-install/post-install inspections" is the one to pay attention to. Only one template per kind (PRE or POST) should be marked default — that's the template SalesThumb actually uses when an inspection gets created for a job, unless a specific template is chosen some other way. If you haven't marked any Post-install template as default, you'll see an amber warning banner at the top of the tab reminding you that jobs will fall back to the built-in checklist instead of anything you've customized — worth checking if the "Require a signed post-install inspection" gate is on and your techs are seeing checklist items you didn't expect. If you have no custom templates at all for a kind, that column just shows "No custom templates — using built-in default" instead of an empty list.
Deleting a template (the trash icon next to each row) is immediate — there's no confirmation dialog, so double-check you've got the right one before clicking it, especially if it's currently your default. From here, the small text link under the page intro ("Require a signed one before invoicing on the QC Gates tab") jumps you back to the Gates tab to flip that toggle on once your template is ready.