Check-Ins
A check-in is a short question the board asks about a job that is not behaving as planned, answered by the person closest to it.
Check-ins are how BayWise stays honest. A plan is only as current as the floor’s willingness to say what is really happening, and asking a technician for a “status update” reliably produces either nothing or an optimistic guess. So BayWise does not ask for a status. It asks one question, at the moment the question is worth asking, with the answers already on the screen.
The problem check-ins solve
The expensive delay in a workshop is not the one that goes wrong. It is the one nobody mentions.
A job estimated at two hours is at three hours. The technician knows it will be another ninety minutes. Nobody else knows anything, because there was no moment at which telling somebody was the obvious thing to do. The controller finds out at 16:30, when the whole afternoon has already been planned around a car that was never going to be ready, and the customer finds out at 17:00.
Everything below exists to move that discovery from 16:30 to 11:50.
Verify — a job running past its estimate
When a job runs past the time it was estimated to take, plus a grace period, the card offers Verify. The chip says how far past estimate the job is running.
The question is: is this step on schedule? There are two answers.
On schedule. The job is nearly there. The board records that a person confirmed it, and stops asking for now.
Delayed. Two further answers are required, and both matter:
- How much longer — in minutes. Quick options are offered, or a custom number.
- Why — from a short list: more complex than expected, parts not available, equipment down, technician unavailable, awaiting customer approval, rework, vendor or sublet shop delayed, nearly done, or other with a note.
That answer does three things at once. The countdown on the card resets against the new number, so the board stops showing a job as indefinitely overrunning. The rest of the day re-plans around the new finish time. And the reason is recorded against the job, so the pattern is visible later in reporting rather than lost in a conversation.
The “how much longer” number is the valuable part. “It’s running late” tells the controller nothing they could not see. “Another 90 minutes” lets them decide whether to move the next car, call a customer, or do nothing.
When the question is asked
The timing is yours to set. Two settings control it:
- Grace — extra time allowed past the estimate, as a percentage of the job’s own estimate, with a minimum of ten minutes so a very short job is not chased immediately.
- Cap — the largest that grace is ever allowed to become, so a very long job is still checked on at a sensible point rather than several hours later.
The settings screen shows a worked example with your own numbers as you change them.
Not started — a job nobody has begun
A vehicle that was due to start and has not been started shows as Not Started rather than as running late. The distinction matters: a job that has not begun is a different problem from a job that is going slowly, and it usually has a different cause — the vehicle is not there, the technician is on something else, or nobody knew it was theirs.
The card says so plainly: this car was due to start and nobody has started it yet. Pressing Start when work begins clears it.
How late a job may be before it is flagged is a setting, from zero minutes upwards.
Still on hold — a paused job nobody has updated
A paused job that sits with no update is the quietest way for a day to go wrong. The parts arrived at 11am; the job resumed in nobody’s mind but the technician’s; the board still shows it paused at 3pm.
After a period you set, a paused job offers Still on hold? with two answers:
- Yes — still on hold, optionally with a note
- No — it’s moving again, which can resume the work there and then
The board records the answer and stops asking until the next interval.
Volunteering an update
A technician does not have to wait to be asked. Any running job offers Update progress — described on the card as optional, with nothing needing an answer yet — so somebody who already knows a job is going to overrun can say so before the board notices.
This is the check-in that costs the least and saves the most, and it is worth telling a new technician about on their first day.
Pausing with a reason
Pausing work is itself a check-in. It asks why: waiting for parts, customer call-back, payment hold, technician unavailable, or other with a note. At least one reason is required.
The reason appears on the card and in the action centre, so a paused vehicle is never just “paused” — it is “held for parts”, which is a thing somebody can act on.
When work resumes, BayWise asks how the pause ended, and records that too.
→ Reference: Pause & Delay Reasons
What check-ins add up to
Individually each check-in is a few seconds of a technician’s time. Collectively they are the shop’s memory.
By the end of a job, BayWise holds a stage-by-stage record: what each stage was planned to take, what it took, who did it, every delay reported and its reason, and how long the vehicle spent waiting rather than being worked on. The detail pane shows the pause history and the check-in history as trails.
That record is what makes the repair analysis worth reading, what makes technician reporting fair, and what lets you answer “why was this car four days” with something better than an impression.
Getting the floor to answer
Three things determine whether check-ins work in a real shop:
Ask rarely enough to be credible. Grace and cap set too tight will chase every job that is five minutes late, and a board that cries wolf gets ignored within a week. Start generous and tighten.
Make it obviously worth it. A technician who reports ninety minutes and watches the next car get moved off their bay learns immediately that the button does something. One who reports a delay and sees nothing change learns the opposite.
Never use it as a stick. The moment a check-in is used to explain to a technician why their afternoon was slow, the honest numbers stop, and the board goes back to being decoration.