The Working Day
BayWise plans days, and a day has edges. This page is about those edges: when you are open, what happens at breaks, how a day is closed, and what carries into tomorrow.
Operating hours
Operating hours are set per location, per day of the week. They are the outer boundary of everything: work is never planned to start before you open or to run past close.
Hours vary by day and BayWise respects each day individually — a shortened Saturday is a shortened Saturday, not an average.
Future days use that day’s hours. If a vehicle is being planned for next Thursday, next Thursday’s hours apply.
Breaks
Breaks are named periods when the shop is not working — lunch, prayer, a shift changeover. No work is planned to happen during a break.
How a break interacts with a job that would span it is your choice:
Split around the break. Work pauses for the break and resumes after. The job’s total elapsed time stretches to account for the gap.
Schedule after the break. Jobs never overlap a break at all; a job that would run into one starts after it instead.
Split around is right for most repair work, where a technician genuinely stops and picks up where they left off. Schedule after suits work that cannot be interrupted once begun — a paint cure, a road test — though in practice most shops handle those through the service’s own definition rather than the break rule.
Day close
Day close is the moment a day becomes a record. It is not paperwork for its own sake — it is what makes tomorrow’s plan start from the truth.
At close, BayWise separates what it can determine from what only a person knows.
Recorded automatically — what finished, what carried over, what never started, and how many of each. Nobody is asked to confirm facts the system already holds.
Needs you — the small set of genuinely human questions:
- A vehicle on hold: is it still waiting tomorrow? Still waiting, or resolved.
- A vehicle that could not be placed today: is it still wanted tomorrow? Keep it, or drop it.
- A bay that had a vehicle and has shown nothing since: is it empty now? Empty, or still has a car.
- Anything that needs a delay reason, from a standard list — pending diagnosis, awaiting customer approval, insurance authorisation, waiting for parts, waiting for a specialist, technician unavailable, bay or equipment unavailable, sublet, or other.
The screen shows how many of these you have answered, and closing records both the answers and who gave them.
Day close typically takes a couple of minutes because it only asks about the things a person can actually answer. A close that asks about forty vehicles is a sign that the floor has not been checking in during the day — the questions have simply accumulated.
Carry-over
Work still open at close does not vanish and is not silently rescheduled. It is carried over by agreement, with the time that was agreed.
A carried-over vehicle appears on tomorrow’s board marked as carried over, showing the time remaining. It is not late. It escalates only if it runs past what was agreed at close.
This distinction keeps a body shop’s board honest. A five-day repair that carries over four nights is four nights of normal operation, not four days of alarm.
The scheduling freeze
If a day is left unclosed, scheduling stops.
When a day is outstanding, the board renders read-only: cards, the action centre and the detail pane all show everything, and their actions are disabled with a note explaining why. A banner names the outstanding day and offers to close it.
Two things are never blocked: checking a vehicle in and clocking on. Those record things that physically happened, and refusing them would only make the record wrong.
Closing the outstanding day releases the board immediately.
The freeze is deliberate, and it is the part of BayWise that surprises people most. The reasoning is that a plan built on an unclosed day is a plan built on a guess: BayWise does not know whether the vehicle in bay six left last night or is still there. Rather than plan on an assumption and be wrong all day, it asks for two minutes first.
→ Understand the scheduling freeze
Reminders before the freeze
BayWise tries not to surprise you with it. There are reminders as the shop’s closing time approaches, a prompt when you sign out with a day still open, and a message the next morning explaining that today’s scheduling cannot start until yesterday is closed. Each of them offers to close the day there and then.
Shop closures
A day the shop is not open — a public holiday, a shutdown week, a one-off closure — is declared in advance.
No work is planned for a declared closed day. Vehicles that would have carried into it are held for the next open day instead. A closure can be undone until the shop opens on that day.
Declaring closures matters more than it looks. A shop that does not declare its holidays gets a plan that promises work on days nobody is there.
A day, end to end
Müller Werkstatt, Berlin — six bays, one zone, opens 07:30.
07:20. Stefan opens the board. Yesterday was closed last night, so today is planned and the freeze banner is absent. Eleven vehicles, two carried over.
07:30–12:00. Work runs. Two check-ins are answered from the floor: one job on schedule, one delayed by 45 minutes with the reason parts not available. The afternoon re-plans around the second.
12:00–12:45. The lunch break. Nothing is planned into it; the two jobs spanning it pause and resume.
16:00. Two vehicles show as finished and holding bays. They are handed over, freeing the bays for the two evening jobs.
17:30. The shop closes at 18:00 and a reminder appears: closing the day now takes a moment. Stefan answers three questions — the parts hold is still waiting tomorrow, one vehicle that could not be placed is still wanted, bay four is empty — and closes.
Tomorrow, 07:20. The board is planned, the two carried-over vehicles show as carried over with their agreed times, and nobody has rebuilt anything.