A client's chart history

"What did we use last time?" is the question charting exists to answer, and it's the one that gets asked while somebody is already gowned up.

Chart history is the per-client view of everything ever charted about them. It has no menu entry — you reach it from the client's name in the Charts list, or from Chart history on any of their charts.

The timeline

Every chart for that client, newest first, each card showing the template, the date and the first few answered fields. Press the name to open the full record.

Read down it and you can see the shape of somebody's hair over a year: what was tried, what drifted, what got corrected. That is worth considerably more than any single chart, and it's why attaching the client when you start a chart matters more than any other single habit here.

Asking a question

Ask about this client takes a plain question — "what colour did we use last visit?", "has she ever reacted to anything?", "how long do we usually process?" — and answers it from that client's completed charts. Underneath the answer it says how many charts it read, so you can tell the difference between a confident answer drawn from eight visits and one drawn from one.

It only reads charts. It doesn't know what was booked, what was sold or what they said in the inbox, and it will not invent a formula that isn't written down. If nothing in the charts answers the question, it says so — which is the correct answer and a useful one.

Comparing two visits

Once a client has two or more charts, Compare two visits appears. Pick an earlier one and a later one, press Compare, and you get the fields that changed — the old value struck through, the new one beside it — with a written summary of what the change amounts to.

Compare two charts on the same template. Two different templates have two different field sets, so everything reads as changed and the comparison tells you nothing you didn't know.

The written summary is the part worth reading. A field-by-field diff tells you the developer volume went from 20 to 30; the summary tells you the plan moved from a gloss refresh to a root melt because the warmth turned out to be oxidation rather than lift. That's the sentence you'd have said out loud to a colleague, and it's the one nobody writes down.

What it doesn't cover

Charts with no client attached don't appear here — there's no client for them to appear under. In-progress charts show on the timeline with their status, but they're not read when you ask a question, because a half-written chart is not yet a fact about anybody.