The Technician
A technician is a person who does work in your bays. Alongside bays, technicians are the capacity BayWise plans against: work needs somebody qualified, present, and not already fully occupied.
Everything BayWise knows about a technician is something you tell it, and each field changes what work reaches them.
What a technician carries
| Property | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Name and employment status | Whether they exist in the plan at all |
| Skills | What kinds of work can reach them |
| Certifications | What safety-gated work can reach them, and until when |
| Skill notes | The written detail that separates two technicians with the same skill list |
| Availability | Which hours on which days they are working |
| Maximum concurrent jobs | How many jobs they can hold at once |
| Efficiency rating | The pace at which they work, relative to standard times |
| Cost and billing rates | What their time costs and what it bills at |
| Attendance | Whether they are actually here today |
Skills
Skills are the structured list of what a technician can do — the counterpart to a bay’s capabilities. Work reaches a technician who holds the matching skill.
Recording skills accurately on everyone matters more than recording them exhaustively on your best person. A workshop that lists diagnostics against one senior technician and nobody else has told BayWise that only one person can do diagnostics, and will get exactly the overloaded plan that implies.
When a plan repeatedly overloads one technician, look at the skills of the people around them before you look at anything else. Nine times out of ten, colleagues who can do the work have not been recorded as able to do it.
Skill notes
A free-text field for the detail a skill list cannot hold: the makes they know well, the diagnostic work they are trusted with, the equipment they are strongest on. It is read where the structured skills do not settle the matter on their own — which is most often exactly the ambiguous, high-value work you would want assigned thoughtfully.
You can also describe a technician in your own words and have BayWise suggest a skill list from the description, then adjust it before saving.
Certifications
Certifications are formal qualifications, and BayWise treats them differently from skills: they are a safety gate.
Each certification can record a level or class, an expiry date, a credential reference, an issuing body and a jurisdiction. The expiry date matters — safety-gated work only reaches a technician whose certification is current, and the detail pane flags a certification that has expired or is close to expiring on a vehicle where it is relevant.
High-voltage and EV work is the clearest case: without the certification, the work does not reach the technician, regardless of how free they are.
Availability
Availability is the pattern of hours a technician works, set per day of the week, with a shift start and end.
A technician’s availability sits inside the workshop’s operating hours: if the shop closes at 18:00 and a technician’s shift runs to 18:30, the shop’s hours win. Work is never planned outside your operating hours.
Attendance and clock-in
Availability says who is meant to be here. Attendance says who is.
Your workshop chooses between two rules:
- Require clock-in — only technicians who have clocked in today are planned. The strictest and truest setting, and the right one for shops where attendance varies.
- Do not require clock-in — technicians are planned on their weekly hours without clocking in. Simpler, and appropriate for small stable teams.
Whichever you choose, marking somebody absent removes them from the plan and their work is re-placed against colleagues.
→ Configure clock-in rules · When a technician is absent
Maximum concurrent jobs
The Max WIP Jobs setting is how many jobs a technician can hold at the same time. “WIP” is work in progress — jobs that are open against them, whether or not they are physically standing at that vehicle right now.
Set to 1, a technician does one thing at a time and nothing else reaches them until it is done. Higher numbers suit work with waiting built into it — a technician who starts a diagnostic scan and works another vehicle while it runs.
This is a boundary, not a target. BayWise will not exceed it.
Higher is not better. A technician carrying four open jobs is not doing four jobs — they are switching between four jobs, and every switch costs time that no estimate accounts for. Most shops settle at 1 or 2.
Efficiency rating
The efficiency rating describes the pace at which a technician works relative to your standard service times. A rating above standard means they typically finish inside the catalogue time; below means they typically need longer.
It is used when working out how long their work will take, so the plan reflects who is actually doing the job rather than an average technician who does not exist.
Set it honestly. An inflated rating does not make anybody faster; it produces a day that was never achievable, and a run of jobs that all report as running late.
Rates
Cost per hour is what the technician’s time costs you internally. Billing rate per hour is what their time bills at, overriding the workshop default where their work is charged differently.
These feed reporting and incentives rather than scheduling.
How a technician appears on the board
Technicians appear on the bay cards for the vehicles they are working, and as rows in the Techs calendar view where you can see workload across the day.
The action centre names them when a job is not moving — a vehicle assigned some time ago that nobody has started, or a paused job with no update — so a stalled job is attributable rather than anonymous.
What technicians do themselves
Technicians are not only described in BayWise; they use it. From the board, a technician clocks in, starts work, reports that a job is running longer than expected and by how much, pauses work with a reason, and marks a stage complete.
That last group is what keeps the plan honest. A plan is only as current as the floor’s willingness to say what is happening, and BayWise asks in small, answerable questions rather than expecting a status update.
→ Check-Ins · Getting Started for Technicians