Getting Started for Account Owners

Create your account and organisation

Sign up, then set your organisation name, your first location, its address and — importantly — its time zone. The board shows the location’s time, not the viewer’s, so this must be right.

→ Create your account · Set up your organisation

Set your operating hours and breaks

Set opening and closing times for each day of the week. Mark days you are closed as closed rather than giving them nominal hours.

Then add your breaks — lunch, prayer, shift changeover — and choose how work spanning a break is treated: paused and resumed, or pushed past it entirely.

Nothing is ever planned outside these hours, so a shop that enters optimistic hours gets a plan it cannot deliver.

→ Configure operating hours · Configure break times

Build your equipment catalogue

Before adding bays, list the equipment your workshop has: lifts by type, alignment racks, spray booths, scan tools, frame benches, tyre machines.

You do this first because bays reference it, and it is faster to add twenty items once than to interrupt yourself twenty times.

→ Build your equipment catalogue

Add your bays

For each bay, set its role — work, inspection, holding or delivery — then its capabilities and its equipment.

Be honest about capability. A bay that could take a job in an emergency but should not receive one routinely is a bay that will receive one routinely.

Remember your non-working positions. Parking slots and the handover space are bays too, with holding and delivery roles, and adding them keeps your working floor showing only work.

→ Add and manage bays · Set a bay’s role and capabilities

Write a description for every bay

This is the highest-value step in the whole setup, and the one most often skipped.

Each bay’s description should say what it is for, what equipment makes it suitable, and — the part that matters most — what it must not receive. The quality indicator beside the field tells you when a description is too short or too generic, and reserves its top rating for descriptions that state an exclusion.

“Mechanical bay with a two-post lift for general service, brakes and suspension. Not for bodywork, paint, alignment, or EV high-voltage jobs.”

Do all of them in one sitting while the distinctions are fresh.

→ Write a bay description

Group bays into zones, if you have them

If your shop does more than one kind of work, group the bays into zones and give each a type — rapid, mechanical, electrical and diagnostics, body and collision, paint, detailing, parking, delivery.

Name a supervisor for each zone. On the board, that name sits on the zone header.

A single-purpose shop can skip this entirely and lose nothing.

→ Organise bays into zones

Set your bay buffer time

Set the gap held between one vehicle leaving a bay and the next arriving, to whatever your changeover actually takes. Rapid-service shops are usually five to ten minutes; heavier work is longer.

→ Set bay buffer time

Add your technicians

For each technician: their skills, their certifications with levels and expiry dates, their weekly availability, how many jobs they can hold at once, and their efficiency relative to your standard times.

→ Add and manage technicians · Assign skills · Record certifications

Decide your clock-in rule

Choose whether technicians must clock in to be counted as available, or whether they are planned on their weekly hours.

Require clock-in where attendance varies. Leave it off for a small, stable team.

→ Configure clock-in rules

Build your service catalogue

Add your services with realistic durations. These are what the plan is built from — optimistic durations produce a day full of jobs reporting as late.

Then define your repair steps and combine them into presets, so that a multi-stage job generates its stages automatically at check-in.

→ Build your service catalogue · Create repair steps · Create repair presets

Invite your team

Invite the people who will use BayWise, each with the role that matches their job. Managers as Location Managers, the person running the floor as Workshop Controller, advisors and the front desk as Service Advisors.

→ Invite team members · Manage roles

Check the alerts suit your shop

The defaults are sensible, but two settings are worth reading before your first busy day: how long a job may run past its estimate before the floor is asked about it, and how long a paused job may sit without an update.

Start generous. A board that chases every job five minutes late gets ignored within a week.

→ Tune alerts and reminders