Where a repair starts
Shop scheduling: a board, a queue and bay loading
A repair's lifecycle starts with a booking, not a work order. The Scheduler shows the shop's day as it actually is: which mechanic is free, which bay is taken, and how many people are waiting without a fixed time.
Where a repair starts
Scheduler & bay loading
Bookings on a board — by mechanic or by bay, drag-and-drop. A queue holds the customers who won't name an hour. And the work you planned travels into the work order with the booking.
- A board by mechanic or by bay: who's free, and when the next slot opens
- A no-fixed-time queue for the customers who'll turn up “sometime in the morning”
- A load view showing your busiest and your idlest mechanic
- A booking converts into a work order, planned jobs and all
The board: by mechanic or by bay
The service advisor's main view is a board on a time axis, readable two ways. “By mechanic” answers “who is free, and when is the next slot”. “By bay” shows how busy the shop floor itself is regardless of who is working in it — which is what you need when you have fewer lifts than people.
Bookings move by dragging: to another time, another mechanic, another bay. The schedule updates immediately, with nothing to save or confirm. Alongside it sits an ordinary day and week calendar, for judging overall load rather than a single slot.
The same view reads by mechanic, or by bay.
A queue for the ones who won't name an hour
Some customers will never give you a time. For them there is a queue: a booking with no fixed slot that sits in a waiting list and gets taken the moment a mechanic frees up. It is more honest than booking someone for 10:00 knowing they'll arrive around lunch.
The booking log is split into tabs: scheduled, queue, converted, cancelled and all. A cancelled booking doesn't vanish — the history stays. Filters by location, mechanic, bay and status work in every view.
Scheduled
- 09:00Passat B8 — service
- 11:30Octavia — brakes
- 14:00Sprinter — diagnostics
Queue
- Golf VII
- Duster
- Transit
Load, and the handover into an order
A dedicated load view shows the number of bookings per mechanic, your busiest and your idlest, and any bookings with nobody assigned at all. It is the screen that shows one technician doing half the shop's work — before he mentions it himself.
While creating a booking you can already draft the work: add a service, an item or a custom line. When the customer arrives the booking converts into a work order and those planned jobs travel with it. It also buys you the time to have the parts ready.
Questions & answers
Frequently asked questions
Can customers book themselves through a website?
No. The Scheduler is a tool for the service advisor and dispatcher: bookings are created by the shop, not by the customer. Customer self-service booking from a website isn't part of the product today.
Do I have to assign a mechanic when booking?
No — the assignee and bay fields are both optional. You can create the booking without them and assign someone later, once it's clear who will actually be free.
What happens to a booking once an order exists?
It moves to the “Converted” tab and stays in the history. The link between booking and order is kept, so you can see which booking a given repair grew out of.
What happens next, in the orderThe mechanic's workspaceVector pricing