The Job
A job is one visit by one vehicle: everything you agreed to do to that car on that occasion. Elsewhere in the trade it is the repair order, the RO, or the job card. In BayWise it is created when the vehicle is checked in, and it lives until the vehicle is handed back or the job is cancelled.
A job is what your customer thinks they have bought. Everything else in BayWise exists to move jobs through the shop.
What a job holds
- The vehicle — plate, make and model
- The customer and their contact details
- The work agreed — one or more services from your catalogue
- The promise time — when you told the customer they can have it back
- The stages — the steps the work breaks into
- The record — what happened, when, and who did it
Stages
Most work breaks into stages. A brake service might be a single stage. A collision repair is a sequence: strip, panel work, prep, paint, cure, refit, quality check.
Stages matter because they are the unit BayWise plans. A vehicle does not occupy a bay “for a repair” — it occupies a bay for the stage it is currently in, with a technician qualified for that stage, and moves on when the stage is done.
This is what allows a vehicle to move across the floor sensibly: a body job can occupy a body bay for two days, a paint booth for one, and an inspection bay for an hour, without anyone planning that path by hand.
Where stages come from
Stages are generated when the vehicle is checked in, from the services chosen and from your repair presets — templates that turn “full respray” into the standard sequence your shop uses for a full respray.
You maintain both the individual repair steps and the presets that combine them.
→ Create repair steps · Create repair presets
Single-stage jobs
Not everything needs stages. A wash, a bulb, a tyre rotation is one thing done once, and BayWise handles a job with a single stage exactly as you would expect — it appears on the board as one piece of work.
Statuses
A job carries a status describing where it is. The statuses fall into recognisable groups:
Waiting on somebody else — Waiting Decision, Waiting Approval, Waiting Parts, Waiting Sublets. The vehicle is yours but the next move is not.
Ready and running — Ready for Service, In Progress, Paused.
Checking the work — Inspection, Road Test.
Finishing — Washing, Finalized, Waiting Invoicing, Waiting Delivery.
Done — Delivered.
Stages carry their own simpler status: pending, in progress, completed, or skipped.
Phases
Statuses group into four phases, which is how the board and the calendars colour work at a glance:
| Phase | Means |
|---|---|
| Planning | Agreed but not yet being worked on |
| Production | Being worked on |
| Quality | Work done, being checked |
| Completion | Checked, being finished and handed over |
A vehicle cannot skip forward through the phases. Paint does not begin before prep is complete; delivery does not happen before the quality check.
Multi-day work
A job whose stages run past today does not need re-planning tomorrow. It holds its bay, appears on the board marked as multi-day, and continues.
At day close, work still open is carried over deliberately — recorded, with a reason where a person needs to give one — so tomorrow starts from what is actually true rather than from an assumption.
A carried-over vehicle shows as such on the board the next day, with the time that was agreed. It is not late; it escalates only if it runs past what was agreed at close.
Sublet work
Some stages are not done by you. A stage can be marked as sublet to an outside vendor — a specialist, an upholsterer, a machine shop.
Sublet stages appear on the board with the vendor named, and hold their place in the sequence, because the stages behind them still depend on them. When the outside shop reports a delay, the board shows the stage as sublet and delayed, and the rest of the vehicle’s plan moves accordingly.
Rework
Work that fails a quality check goes back. Reopening a stage sends the vehicle back to the point where the problem was introduced, and the stages after it become outstanding again.
A reworked vehicle carries a visible rework count on its card, so nobody mistakes it for new work, and reporting can see how much rework a shop is actually doing.
Cancellation
A job can be cancelled with a reason — customer declined, estimate too high, duplicate job, vehicle withdrawn, or another reason you write down. The vehicle leaves today’s plan, its bay is freed, and any work already recorded is kept.
A vehicle that has already been handed over cannot be cancelled.
Handover
When every stage is done, the vehicle is finished — but it is still in a bay, and the bay is capacity you need.
Finished vehicles appear in the action centre under Unblock with the reason “every step done · holding a bay”. Handing the vehicle over from the board frees the bay immediately.
Handover is deliberately a human action. A vehicle is not handed over because the work finished; it is handed over because a person gave the keys back. BayWise will keep telling you the bay is being held, but it will never decide the car has left.
The record
Every job accumulates a record: what each stage was planned to take, what it actually took, who did it, what delays were reported and why, and how long the vehicle spent waiting rather than being worked on.
You can read that record at any time from the detail pane. After a vehicle is handed over, BayWise can also produce a repair analysis for the job — where the time actually went, what caused the delays, and what would have made it faster.