Two separate screens here, one paid and one free, and the free one is easy to miss because it has no sidebar entry.
Mechanics: the productivity view (paid)
Mechanics, under Workshop in the sidebar. It is the Mechanic Productivity Dashboard, 19 dollars a month from the App Marketplace. Without it the page shows what the app does rather than the numbers.
It is built entirely from the time entries your team already logs against jobs. There is nothing new to record.
Per technician, for this month:
- Billable hours and billable value
- Utilisation, billable hours divided by total logged hours
- Comeback rate, the share of vehicles that technician worked on which came back within 30 days of their last touch
- A six week trend, so you can see a direction rather than one month's noise
- Certification status, pulled from the register below
Two things to know before you act on the numbers. Billable value only counts entries that carry an hourly rate, so a time entry logged without one adds hours and no dollars and will drag utilisation and value apart. And comeback rate is a prompt, not a verdict: a technician doing all the hardest diagnostic work will always look worse than one doing oil changes.
The Monday email
Once a week we email the workshop a per-technician summary for the previous week. A week with no logged time entries produces no email rather than an empty one.
Certifications: the register (free)
This screen is not in the sidebar. Reach it from the workshop dashboard, from the Today briefing, or from the Mechanics page. The address is /dashboard/mechanic-certs.
It is free.
For each person record the certificate type: LVT (Light Vehicle Trade), ARC refrigerant handling, gas work licence, auto-electrical, brake adjuster, or a custom one of your own. Then the certificate number, the issue and expiry dates, the issuing authority, a link to the certificate document, and notes.
The expiry chase
We email the workshop about a lapsing certificate at 60, 30, 14 and 3 days out, and then every day once it has expired. The daily nagging after expiry is deliberate. A lapsed ARC ticket is not an administrative matter.
Where to start
Enter the certifications first. They are free, they take twenty minutes, and an expired licence is a bigger problem than an unmeasured utilisation rate.
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