Buildings and areas

A building here is a record, not a note on a customer. It has a name, a stable slug, a type, society, tower, villa compound, office or other, an emirate, and a billing choice. The list filters by all of those and by active status, and each row shows the households on it, the washes it has seen over the last ninety days and how many of those the office still has to look at. Before this was a record, the same tower was written three ways and no washer could be told where the gate was.

The billing choice decides who is invoiced for the month. A society-billed building is one bill to the society for its washes; a resident-billed one is paid car by car as usual. This is a governed field: only an owner can change who is invoiced, and only with a reason, because it changes how the money for a whole building flows.

The reason buildings exist as records at all is the basement. The area a wash belongs to is normally derived from the GPS fix on the first photograph, and underground there is no fix, which is exactly the case for the compounds worth holding a contract with. A washer picking the building they are standing in records where the wash happened without needing a satellite, so the buildings most valuable to serve are no longer the ones the system loses.

The record also carries what a washer needs before arriving, access notes, the gate pass arrangement and a security contact, so the crew turns up able to get in rather than calling the office from the barrier. Buildings sit within the service areas the panel groups and filters by across the washes, schedule and dashboard screens.