The day is sold before it is worked
A service department’s scarce resource is bay-hours, and the way it goes wrong is always the same: the telephone sells more of Wednesday than Wednesday has. Yesterday’s car is still on the ramp, somebody will walk in without an appointment, and something will arrive on a recovery truck at four o’clock.
So capacity is published before it is sold. A loading table takes a work centre’s real day — bays multiplied by hours per bay — and splits it across a date range into four buckets: appointments, carry-over, walk-ins and emergencies. Committing the sheet writes one capacity row per calendar day.
A service request is then booked against that. Picking the vehicle fills the screen from its file — plate, chassis, engine, brand, model, insurance and warranty cover, the last odometer reading — and the requested tasks arrive from the labour catalogue with their standard hours. On commit, two things are checked: that the slot falls inside the work centre’s reception window, and that the day’s booked hours still fit the hours published for appointments. One caveat for the counter staff: that second comparison only runs once a day already holds a booking, so the first appointment of each morning is the one to read twice.
Reception, and what the car looked like on arrival
The walk-round is a product inspection document built from a template of inspection points — bodywork front, tyre condition, fuel level, spare wheel — each recorded as a free-text finding, with the point’s own list of answers prompting the receptionist. Templates are chosen by hand rather than derived from the model, so keep the list short and name each one for the situation it belongs to. The sheet settles the argument about the scratch on collection day, and it is a condition record only: its findings do not become work.
The order that holds the truth about the job
An estimate prices the work and a revised estimate answers the customer who negotiated an item out of it. The job order is what everything else hangs off. It posts nothing and it moves nothing — it is a demand document that plans which parts the job needs — and it holds the vehicle, the work centre, the reception engineer, the work-in-progress store, the operations and the parts.
Labour is priced from the catalogue: hour price multiplied by duration and count, taken from the task’s line for this vehicle’s model where one exists. Services explode into their constituent tasks, and either the parent carries a package price or the children are priced individually. Each line also carries the split across payers that the dealer group’s stack describes.
Nothing in the chain is compulsory. The documents are joined by a from document field, and copying forward takes a snapshot rather than opening a channel that keeps feeding.
Parts, sublet work and clocked time
The storekeeper issues parts against the order, either straight out of the store or as a transfer into the job’s work-in-progress locator, depending on how the document term is set. Returns are the mirror image: unused oil goes back, the parts ledger nets off, and the order is refreshed so the customer is billed the quantity actually consumed.
Work sent outside — a compressor to a bench-testing specialist — is recorded as an external repair, which is a supplier invoice in workshop clothing: one line per task, an expense account per line, and the tasks it names marked finished. It books the supplier’s charge; it does not fold that charge into the job order’s own costing.
Technicians clock each task on and off on an execution document, and no technician may hold two overlapping intervals — the save is refused, naming the interval. Those measured hours drive task status, and therefore what the closing may pull in. They never become money: the customer pays the catalogue’s standard hours. That is a fixed-price workshop by design, not an omission.
Closing and release
There is exactly one closing per job order, ever. It collects the finished operations and all the materials, totals what each payer owes, generates the stock issue for what was consumed, and projects the next visit from the vehicle’s mileage history. Its own journal entry carries the customer’s share; the insurer’s and the warranty provider’s money reaches the ledger through their own invoices — worth knowing before the chart of accounts is designed.
The gate pass answers one question at the exit — has every payer who owes something been invoiced, and paid? Each check is a permission on the document term, so a workshop decides which of them to enforce, and a refusal names the missing invoice or the amount outstanding. It is a release check, not gate control: there is no barrier, no direction and no timestamp.
Between visits, odometer readings keep an average daily distance current, so services that repeat by distance fall due on the right day. Recall campaigns are matched by vehicle: a job order for a car caught by an open campaign is refused until the campaign is named on it.
What else sits on a dealer site
Three smaller features share the menu, each behind its own licence code: service queues — a ticket kiosk, a wall display and advisor stations that call the next number; rental assets — a bookable register billed by the hour or the day, usually the courtesy cars; and courier delivery — a driver’s route sheet for parts going out to fleet customers, not for handing over a sold car.
The workshop licence is separate from the showroom’s. The full chain, document by document, is in the loading table and the job order cycle.
