Your workshop day

A workshop opens with the same question every morning: what needs my eye before the first car arrives. Two screens answer it.

The workshop dashboard

Your home screen when your business type is automotive. It carries:

• The rego box. Type a plate, press enter, land on the car. This is the fastest thing in the product and the one most people never find. Use it when the phone rings.
• Alerts. Vehicles with expired registration, vehicles overdue for service, overdue invoices. Each one clicks through to the filtered list behind it.
• The month. Tiles for how many vehicles you have serviced this month and what you have taken. Progress against your monthly targets lives on the Month-end summary page, which is linked from this dashboard, not on the dashboard itself.

The Today briefing

Today composites the urgent items from six different places into one screen:

1. Overdue rego and service. Vehicles whose registration has already expired, and vehicles past their service interval
2. Stale quote variations. Extra-work approvals that have been waiting on a customer for more than two days
3. Lemon vehicles. Cars that have crossed the repeat-claim threshold in the last 90 days. See lemon watch
4. Awaiting assessor. Insurance repairs that have been sitting with an assessor for more than five days
5. Mechanic certs. Certifications expiring within the next 30 days
6. Parts low-stock. Parts at or under their minimum stock level

There is no Today card for warranty claims. Unsubmitted and unpaid claims will not turn up here, so work those on the claims register itself. See track manufacturer warranty claims.

If everything is clear, it says so rather than showing six empty boxes. Each card is backed independently, so a module you do not use shows a dash rather than breaking the page.

The two screens with no sidebar entry

This catches everyone out. Both are free and both are only reachable from the dashboard, from Today, or by typing the address.

• Quote approvals, at /dashboard/quote-approvals. See chase approvals for extra work.
• Mechanic certifications, at /dashboard/mechanic-certs. See mechanic productivity and certifications.

Bookmark them.

The first-hour checklist

A new workshop account shows a setup checklist on the dashboard with six steps, each ticking itself off as you do it:

1. Set your workshop labour rate
2. Add the first customer vehicle
3. Log the first service
4. Set rego dates on customer vehicles
5. Build the parts catalogue
6. Set up your booking page and services

Each step links to the screen and to the article that explains it. Dismiss the checklist with the close control when you are done with it. Dismissing it is remembered in the browser you dismissed it in, so it can reappear on a different computer. Nothing is lost either way.

A sensible first week

Day one, the labour rate and the checklist. Day two, import the vehicle book. Day three, put rego dates on the cars that have them, because that is the first thing that brings work back through the door on its own. Everything else can wait.

Related

• Add a customer vehicle
• Which workshop apps are paid