Issues and Reasons Explained
Everything in your Inbox is there for a reason — literally. Each entry is an issue, and every issue carries one or more plain-language reasons telling you exactly why a human needs to step in. This article walks through every reason you'll see, what it means, and how each one goes away.
What is an issue?
An issue is Driive's way of saying "this needs a person." Each issue points at exactly one record — a request or an appointment — and shows up as a row in your Inbox with reason chips explaining what's blocking it.
Issues are created by Driive automatically. When a website booking fails your qualification threshold, when a phone call drops before Dot finishes taking the request, when an appointment is created without a time — Driive raises the issue so the item surfaces in front of your team. You don't create issues yourself, and you rarely need to close them yourself either (more on that below).
Every issue reason
| Reason | Applies to | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Needs information | Request | Waiting on more details from the customer before this can move forward. |
| Needs approval | Request | Needs your approval before it can be scheduled. |
| Failed qualification | Request | The lead score fell below the qualification threshold. |
| Out of service area | Request | The customer's location is outside your service area. |
| Manual review | Request | Flagged for a human to review. |
| Call dropped | Request | The call dropped before the request was complete. |
| Customer canceled | Appointment | The customer canceled this appointment via the booking link. |
| Needs scheduled | Appointment | An appointment was created but still needs a time. |
Hovering any reason chip in the app shows the same one-line explanation as a tooltip. An item can carry more than one reason at once — a request might be both Needs information and Needs approval — and each chip clears independently.
Requests vs. appointments
Notice the split in the table: six of the eight reasons live on requests, and two — Needs scheduled and Customer canceled — live on appointments.
That's by design. A request is the intake record: the gathering, qualifying, and approving all happen there. By the time an appointment exists, the only things that can still go wrong are a missing time on the calendar or a customer backing out of one. So your Inbox naturally reads as two kinds of work:
- Requests to shepherd — fill gaps, make a judgment call, follow up after a dropped call.
- Appointments to act on — pick a slot, send the customer a booking link, or follow up on a cancellation.
Issues clear themselves
Here's the best part: you almost never have to "close" an issue. Fix the underlying need and the issue clears on its own — the item simply leaves your Inbox.
| When you… | This clears |
|---|---|
| Fill in the missing details on a request | Needs information |
| Click Approve & Schedule on a request | Needs approval (and any other flags — approving overrides them in one step) |
| Pick a time for an appointment (or the customer books via your link) | Needs scheduled |
For judgment-call reasons like Failed qualification, Out of service area, or Manual review, you decide: if the job is worth taking, Approve & Schedule moves it forward and clears the flags together. If it's not, use Resolve to dismiss the item from your Inbox — the request itself is kept in your Requests history. See Triaging Your Inbox for the full workflow.
Where did "Needs Information" and "Needs Approval" go?
If you've used Driive for a while, you may remember Needs Information and Needs Approval as appointment statuses. They're not statuses anymore — appointments now have five statuses (Needs Scheduled, Scheduled, En Route, Completed, and Canceled), and the gathering and approval work happens earlier, on the request, surfaced as the Inbox issues described above.
The flow is cleaner: a request collects and qualifies the details, and only once it's ready does it become an appointment. See From Request to Appointment for how that handoff works. If you have integrations built against the old statuses, the service request webhook migration guide covers what changed for developers.
Related articles
- Inbox Overview — Where issues appear and how to read the queue.
- Triaging Your Inbox — Working issues day to day.
- Appointment Statuses Explained — The appointment statuses and how they flow.