Changelog — BayWise Scheduler

Version history, newest first. Each entry describes what changed in plain workshop terms.

September 2026

v5.5 — Sep 1, 2026 — A finished stage no longer looks like it’s still waiting to start

• A job that already finished a stage could show up asking to be started again. If a car’s bodywork was done and painting had begun, the bay that held the bodywork could still show “Not Started” with a Start button — even though that work was already complete. Tapping Start then failed, since there was nothing left to start. The board now correctly shows a finished stage as finished.
• When a car moved to a different bay for its next stage, the bay it left behind could keep showing that car instead of going back to available. A Denting job finishing in one bay and continuing as Painting in another no longer leaves a phantom copy behind — the vacated bay now reads Available the moment the car has genuinely moved on.

August 2026

v5.4 — Aug 31, 2026 — Shop floor in daylight

• The shop floor now reads properly in light mode. The bays were drawn for a dark screen: their fill was almost black, and because the bay number is dark ink, the number all but disappeared on a light background. Bays now take their shade from whichever mode you are in, so the plan is as readable on a bright forecourt tablet as it is on the office screen at night. Each zone keeps its own colour.
• Zone names are legible on a light background too, and no longer carry a shadow that read as a smudge.
• The floor plan lines up with the rest of the board. It sat further from the edge than the Cards, Bays and Techs views; the space that frees up goes to the plan itself.
• Buttons no longer lose their label when you point at them. In light mode, hovering a main action button turned it pale while its text stayed white, so the wording vanished under the cursor. Light and dark now behave the same way.
• A pop-out panel on the dashboard could not be closed. It opened underneath the top bar, putting its close button out of reach.

v5.3 — Aug 30, 2026 — Shop floor

• Draw your workshop once, and the board becomes a picture of it. The board has always told you what is happening in each bay. It could not tell you where — every workshop looked like the same column of cards. You can now lay out your actual floor from the Bays screen: drag a bay onto a grid, or a whole zone by its name to place the group and keep its shape.
• Each bay knows which way the car drives in. A small wedge marks the entry side, so a bay entered from the alley reads differently from one entered from the forecourt.
• More than one floor. A basement, a mezzanine, a second building — each gets its own tab. A bay stands on exactly one of them.
• It offers to make room instead of refusing. When a bay will not fit but a small shuffle would clear the space, you are asked whether to move the bays in the way, rather than simply being told no.
• A new view on the board. Shop floor sits alongside Cards, Bays and Techs, and colours the layout by what is happening right now — green for vacant, amber for occupied, red for work that has run past its promise, and grey and crossed through for a bay out of service.
• Put it on a screen on the wall. Full screen fits the plan to the display and, if you have several floors, cycles through them about every thirty seconds — so reception can see where the red bays are without asking.
• A bay card tells you when it is missing from the drawing. Add a bay after the layout exists and it is marked Not on the shop floor until you place it.
• You can place bays without a mouse. Pick one up with the hand button, move it with the arrow keys, rotate, and place.

v5.2 — Aug 29, 2026 — A paused car can give its bay back

• A car waiting on parts no longer holds a bay hostage. When you pause a job, you can now say the vehicle is being moved out of the bay. The bay and the technician both go straight back to the shop for other work, instead of standing idle behind a car that cannot move.
• Say where you are putting it. The pause asks where the vehicle is going, and that note travels with the job — so anyone looking at the board can find the car without asking around.
• Resuming knows the difference. A vehicle that stayed in its bay picks up exactly where it left off. A vehicle that was moved out rejoins the queue and is given the next suitable bay, rather than waiting for the one it used to occupy.
• Stored vehicles are visible, not lost. They appear in the Action Centre marked In storage, and again as Back from storage once you resume them and they are waiting for a bay. A vehicle with no bay has no card on the board — that is expected, and the Action Centre is where you will find it.
• The action rail now sits flush against the edge of the window instead of floating inward on wide screens.

v5.1 — Aug 19, 2026 — Sign-in and Close Day fixes

• Signing in no longer sends you to workshop setup by mistake. In a rare timing case, logging in could land an existing account on the “set up your workshop” screen even though the workshop was already there — risking a second, duplicate workshop being created. Signing in now always goes straight to your existing workshop.
• The Close Day banner now agrees with the Close Day screen. The amber banner that warns a day still needs closing could occasionally show a different message than the screen you land on when you act on it. Both now read from the same signal.
• New locations now get Close Day protection from day one. A newly added location previously needed someone to turn on end-of-day protection by hand, or it silently had none. Every new location now has it on automatically, in effect from the day after it’s created.

v5.0 — Aug 19, 2026 — Analytics, team roles and plans

Three big additions: a full analytics area built on what the board already knows, real logins for your team with roles that match how a workshop actually runs, and self-serve plans.

Analytics

• A new Analytics area, in three views. Today shows the floor as it stands right now — what has arrived, what is moving, what is stopped and why. Operations covers how the shop ran over a period you choose. Business covers the money side, with four plain verdicts on how the shop is performing.
• Every number opens. Click a figure and you get the actual list of vehicles behind it, searchable, filterable by status, and paged. Registration plates in that list open the vehicle directly.
• Set your own targets. Enter the numbers your shop is aiming for and the dashboard judges performance against those, not against a generic benchmark.
• Where a car’s time actually went. Each vehicle’s time is split across what was worked on it and what it spent waiting, with the reason each wait happened.
• Ask questions of your own data. A question bar suggests only questions the underlying figures can genuinely answer, so you never get a confident answer built on numbers that aren’t there.
• Reports run inside the dashboard. The standalone reports screen has been retired; the same reports now run where you are already looking, with a standard period filter.

Team roles & access

• Give your team their own logins. Six roles now work end to end: Account Owner, Org Admin, Location Manager, Service Advisor, Workshop Controller and Read Only. The last two existed in name only before — neither could be assigned to anyone, so in practice everybody was an account owner.
• The advisor owns the promise, the controller owns the floor. A Service Advisor writes up jobs and sets the time promised to the customer but cannot assign a bay or a technician; a Workshop Controller does the assigning and keeps the day moving. This stops a promise made on a phone call from overriding what the floor can actually deliver.
• Permissions read in plain English. Every permission in Settings → Roles now reads like “Cancel jobs” or “Manage the service catalog”.

Plans & billing

• Choose and change your plan yourself, including updating your card and recovering from a failed renewal, without contacting us.
• Billing screens are available in Arabic as well as English.

Fixes & reliability

• Technicians are no longer paid for hours a car sat waiting. Pay is calculated from time actually worked, so a job held up on parts no longer inflates a technician’s timesheet.
• No invented labour or billing rates. Revenue and margin figures stay hidden until you set your real rates, rather than showing a plausible number based on a guess.
• Reports export properly. PDF export runs, Excel cells carry real types instead of text, and dates, times and ratios read honestly in both technician reports.
• A failed load now says so instead of showing an empty “No technicians yet”.
• Bay countdowns, technician names and status labels display correctly on the board.
• The setup checklist can be dismissed, and it no longer covers the action rail.

v4.0 — Aug 9, 2026 — Autonomous scheduling

The largest change in BayWise Scheduler’s history. The workshop is now planned for you: you describe your floor, and the day is produced and continuously re-produced as things change. Nobody builds the schedule.

Highlights

• The day plans itself. Check a vehicle in and it is placed — bay, technician and time — without anyone assigning it. The plan re-makes itself when an absence, an overrun, a hold or a rework changes the day.
• The board is the home screen. Every bay as a card, grouped by zone, with live countdowns, promise tracking and the location’s own clock.
• The action centre. A ranked triage rail of everything that needs a human, in five lenses, each row carrying a plain reason and the actions available.
• Check-ins. When a job runs past its estimate the board asks the floor whether it is on schedule — and if not, how much longer and why. The answer moves the countdown and re-plans the day.
• Vehicles that could not be scheduled are surfaced honestly, with a reason, instead of being squeezed into a plan that cannot happen.

The board

• Bay cards showing vehicle, service, technician, stage progress, countdown and promise, with distinct states for free, changeover, awaiting start, not started, running, paused, running over, finished, maintenance, reserved and sublet.
• Zone grouping with bay counts and named supervisors.
• A detail pane per vehicle with the stage-by-stage record, pause history, check-in history, and eligibility and certification context.
• A change feed — what came in, what left, what started, what advanced, what was re-planned — so an unattended board is safe to leave.
• Filters by zone and status, two card densities, and three views of the same day: cards, bays and technicians.
• Vehicle search across every vehicle that has ever been through the workshop, including ones already handed over.

Check-ins and exceptions

• Verify on a job running past its estimate: on schedule, or delayed with a number of minutes and a reason.
• Update progress — volunteer a delay before the board asks.
• Still on hold? — a paused job with no update is asked whether it is still waiting.
• Not Started — a job past its planned start that nobody has begun is flagged as such, distinct from running late.
• Pause with a structured reason; resume with a note on how the pause ended.
• Rework: reopen the stage where a problem was introduced, with a visible rework count on the card.
• Cancel a job with a reason, freeing its bay and keeping the work already recorded.
• Hand a vehicle over from the board, freeing the bay immediately.

The working day

• Day close separates what BayWise can determine — what finished, what carried over, what never started — from the handful of questions only a person can answer.
• Carry-over is recorded by agreement, with the agreed time, and shows as carried over rather than late.
• Shop closures — declare a holiday or shutdown so nothing is planned for it and carry-over skips it.
• The scheduling freeze — an unclosed day stops scheduling, with reminders before it happens. Checking a vehicle in and clocking on are never blocked.

Describing the workshop

• Bay roles: work, inspection, holding and delivery — so parking and handover positions no longer look like available capacity.
• A structured capability vocabulary with sub-types, and safety gates that refuse capabilities the bay lacks the equipment for.
• Bay descriptions with a quality indicator that reserves its top rating for an explicit statement of what the bay is not for.
• Sixteen zone types covering the full flow of a workshop, from pre-repair inspection to delivery.
• Technician certifications with levels, expiry dates, credential references, issuing bodies and jurisdictions — and expiry that genuinely gates safety-critical work.
• Set up a bay from a photo, compose a description, and suggest technician skills from a plain-English description.

Reporting

• Estimation accuracy per service, so catalogue durations can be corrected from real data.
• Promise adherence, late deliveries and currently overdue stages.
• Repair analysis after handover: where the time went, what the delays cost, what went well, and what to change.
• Vehicle history — every repair order a vehicle has had at your workshop.

Removed

• The Scheduler Dashboard, its job feed and its knowledge base. The board replaces all of it.
• Drag-to-schedule on the calendars. The calendars are now read-only views of the current plan; work is changed from the cards and the action centre.
• Manual AI scheduling suggestions. There is no longer a suggestion to accept — the day is planned.

Documentation

• The Scheduler documentation has been rewritten around the new model. Pages describing the Dashboard and the assign-first workflow have been retired.

Earlier releases

Releases before v4.0 belong to the previous Scheduler, which was built around manual assignment with AI suggestions. Their notes have been retired along with the screens they described.

If you are upgrading from that version, the two pages worth reading first are Autonomous Scheduling and Getting Started for Workshop Controllers.