The Bay
A bay is a physical working position in your workshop: a lift, a ramp, a booth, a marked-out floor space, or a parking slot. Bays are the capacity BayWise plans against — a vehicle occupies one bay at a time, and how many bays you have sets the ceiling on what your shop can do in a day.
A bay in BayWise is not just a number. It is a description of what that position can and cannot do, and that description is the single most consequential thing you configure.
What a bay carries
| Property | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Number or name | How the bay is identified on the board and in reports |
| Role | Whether the bay does work, inspects, holds vehicles, or hands them over |
| Capabilities | What kinds of work can land here |
| Equipment | What is physically available, and what safety-gated work is therefore possible |
| Description | The written detail — especially what the bay is not for |
| Zone | Which area of the floor it belongs to, and who supervises it |
| Buffer time | The gap held between one vehicle leaving and the next arriving |
| Status | Whether the bay is available at all |
| Display order | Where it sits on the board |
| Photo | An image on the card so the bay is recognisable |
Role
Every bay has one of four roles, and the role decides whether it needs capabilities at all.
Work — the bay performs repair or service. Needs capabilities and equipment.
Inspection — the bay assesses rather than repairs: arrival walkarounds, diagnostic scans, estimates, post-repair quality checks, statutory testing. Needs capabilities describing what it can inspect.
Holding — the bay parks vehicles between stages. Needs no capabilities or equipment, because no work happens there. Use it for pre-service parking, awaiting-authorisation areas, and finished vehicles awaiting collection.
Delivery — the bay is for handover and pickup. Needs no capabilities or equipment.
Getting the role right is what keeps your working floor showing work. A shop that gives every parking slot a “work” role has a floor full of bays that look available and are not.
Capabilities
Capabilities are what the bay can handle, chosen from a structured list. Many capability groups open into sub-types — a bay that does braking work can be marked as doing all braking work, or only specific kinds.
The rule for sub-types is simple: leave everything unchecked and the bay does everything in that group. Tick specific sub-types only where the bay is genuinely limited.
Capabilities are a boundary, not a preference. A job never lands in a bay whose capabilities do not cover it — however busy the shop is, however free the bay is.
Presets
Three presets fill in a common setup in one tap: Rapid / Express Bay, A/C & Climate Bay, and Electrical & Diagnostics Bay. They are a starting point, not a commitment — adjust afterwards.
Equipment
Equipment is what the bay physically has: a two-post lift, an alignment rack, a spray booth, a scan tool, a frame bench. You draw from an equipment catalogue you maintain for the whole workshop.
Equipment matters in two ways. It narrows what work is appropriate for the bay, and for safety-gated work it is a hard requirement: if you tick a capability whose work cannot be done safely without a particular piece of equipment, BayWise blocks the save and tells you what to add first.
Do not tick equipment the bay does not have to make a job fit today. You are not solving a scheduling problem, you are creating a standing instruction to send that work here every day from now on.
→ Build your equipment catalogue
The description
Every bay has a free-text description, and it does real work. Where two bays look identical in their structured setup, the description is what separates them.
The field carries a quality indicator that moves as you type — from Add a description, through A bit short and Too generic, to Good and Great. The top rating requires one thing in particular: an explicit statement of what the bay is not for.
A description that earns the top rating names three things:
- What the bay is for, in the words your shop uses
- The key equipment that makes it suitable
- What it must not receive — the exclusion
“Mechanical bay with a two-post lift for general service, brakes and suspension. Also handles exhaust work. Not for bodywork, paint, alignment, or EV high-voltage jobs.”
The exclusion is the part most shops leave out and the part that pays for itself fastest.
Buffer time
Buffer time is the gap held between one vehicle leaving a bay and the next arriving. It covers moving the outbound vehicle off the lift, staging the inbound one, and finishing the paperwork.
It is set once for the workshop and applied to every bay. BayWise treats the buffer as part of the bay’s occupancy, so you never have to reserve it yourself. The visible effect is small deliberate gaps between vehicles on the calendar views — those gaps are not waste, they are the changeover you are actually doing.
A rapid-service shop with a two-minute changeover and a fifteen-minute buffer is throwing away real capacity; a collision shop with a five-minute buffer is planning a day that cannot physically happen. Set it to what your floor actually takes.
Status
A bay is Active, Maintenance, Reserved, or Inactive.
Active bays are planned normally.
Maintenance takes the bay out of the plan entirely — nothing new is placed there, and the card shows it as under maintenance. Use it for a broken lift or a booth being serviced.
Reserved holds the bay for a vehicle that is expected but not yet started. The card shows the vehicle it is waiting for.
Inactive removes the bay from the workshop without deleting its history. A bay referenced by past or current jobs cannot be permanently deleted — deactivate it instead.
How a bay appears on the board
An occupied bay card shows the vehicle, the service, the technician, how many stages are done, a countdown to the end of the current stage, and the promise time. An empty card shows the bay as free, and whether another vehicle is booked in soon.
A bay in changeover shows as such rather than as free — the previous vehicle has left, and the next cannot start yet.
Getting it wrong, and what it looks like
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Work lands here that this bay cannot really do | Capabilities too broad, or no exclusions in the description | Narrow the capabilities; write the exclusion |
| This bay is never used | Capabilities too narrow, equipment missing, or wrong role | Widen capabilities; check the role is Work |
| The floor looks full but half of it is parked cars | Parking slots given the Work role | Change them to Holding |
| Vehicles arrive before the last one has left | Buffer time shorter than your real changeover | Raise the buffer |
| A specialist bay is used for routine work | Nothing distinguishes it from general bays | Add the exclusion to its description |