Add & Manage Bays
A bay is any physical workspace in your workshop — a lift, a paint booth, a wheel alignment station, or an open floor area — where a technician performs job work. BayWise Scheduler uses bay records to build the calendar grid, power AI scheduling suggestions, and enforce resource availability rules.
Every job must be assigned to a bay before it can begin. Keeping your bay list accurate and up to date is the foundation of a well-functioning schedule.
Who can manage bays: Location Manager, Org Admin, Account Owner.
Add a bay
Open Bay Settings
From the main navigation, go to Settings → Bays.
You will see the full list of bays configured for your current location. At Tanaka Auto Service in Osaka, for example, this list would show all six bays: Body Prep, Paint Booth 1, Paint Booth 2, Service Bay 1, Service Bay 2, and Tire Bay.
Click Add Bay
Click the + Add Bay button in the top-right corner of the bay list.
The Add Bay panel slides open on the right side of the screen.
Fill in the bay details
Complete the following fields:
- Bay Name (required) — A clear, functional label that advisors and technicians will recognise instantly. Use the bay’s primary purpose in the name. Examples: “Service Bay 3”, “Paint Booth 1”, “Tire Bay”, “Spray Booth – Waterborne”.
- Notes (optional) — Any operational notes relevant to this bay. Examples: “Maximum vehicle height 2.1 m”, “Ventilation system — door must remain closed during spray cycles”, “Dedicated to fleet vehicles on Mondays”.
Save
Click Save. The bay is created immediately and appears:
- In the Bay Settings list
- As a new column on the calendar grid
- In the bay assignment dropdown when creating or editing jobs
Edit a bay
Open Bay Settings
Go to Settings → Bays.
Open the edit panel
Click the edit icon (pencil) to the right of the bay name you want to update.
The edit panel opens, showing the current bay name, notes, equipment links, and maintenance status.
Update the fields
Change the bay name, notes, or any other field as needed. All fields behave identically to the Add Bay form.
Save
Click Save. Changes apply immediately across the calendar grid and all scheduling views.
Link equipment to a bay
Linking equipment tells the AI scheduler which bays are capable of handling services that require specific tools. This is what allows BayWise to suggest the right bay automatically — for example, routing a four-wheel alignment job only to bays fitted with an alignment rack, not to a general mechanical bay.
Open the bay edit panel
Go to Settings → Bays, then click the edit icon next to the bay you want to configure.
Scroll to the Equipment section
Inside the edit panel, scroll down to the Equipment section. This displays any equipment items already linked to the bay.
Add equipment items
Click Add Equipment and select from your workshop’s equipment catalog. You can link multiple items to a single bay.
For example, Santos Body Works in São Paulo might configure their spray booth as follows:
- Gravity-feed spray gun system
- Infrared curing lamp (mobile)
- Downdraft ventilation unit
Save
Click Save. The equipment links are stored against the bay. From this point forward, any service in your catalog that requires this equipment will include this bay in AI scheduling suggestions.
Adding equipment to a bay does not affect existing jobs. Equipment links are evaluated at the point of scheduling suggestion, so updating them improves future AI suggestions immediately without changing anything already on the calendar.
Set a bay to maintenance
When a bay needs to go offline — for equipment servicing, a building repair, or a planned upgrade — you can put it into maintenance mode without deleting it. The bay stays visible on the calendar so the team can see it is unavailable, but no new jobs can be booked into it.
Open Bay Settings
Go to Settings → Bays.
Toggle maintenance on
Find the bay you need to take offline and click the Maintenance toggle next to it. The toggle turns active and the bay status changes to Maintenance.
The bay immediately stops appearing as an option in the bay assignment dropdown when creating or editing jobs. On the calendar grid, the bay column is visually marked as unavailable.
Check existing jobs
Any jobs already assigned to this bay are not automatically moved. They remain in place on the calendar and must be rescheduled manually.
Review the calendar for that bay’s column and reassign any affected jobs before the maintenance period begins. At Tanaka Auto Service, for instance, if Paint Booth 2 is being serviced for three days, any jobs booked into that bay during that window need to be moved to Paint Booth 1 or held in the job queue.
Bring the bay back online
When maintenance is complete, return to Settings → Bays and click the Maintenance toggle again to deactivate it. The bay returns to active status and becomes available for new bookings immediately.
Delete a bay
Bays can be permanently deleted, but only when there are no current or future jobs assigned to them. Deletion removes the bay from the calendar grid, from AI scheduling, and from all assignment dropdowns.
Open Bay Settings
Go to Settings → Bays.
Confirm there are no active or future jobs
Before proceeding, check the calendar to confirm the bay has no upcoming job assignments. BayWise will block deletion if active or future jobs are found — you will need to reassign those jobs first.
Click Delete
Click the delete icon (bin) next to the bay name. A confirmation prompt will appear.
Confirm
Confirm the deletion. The bay is removed immediately.
Do not delete bays that have historical job records. Deletion cannot be undone, and removing a bay that has been used in the past will create gaps in your historical reports and job audit trails. If a bay is no longer in service, rename it to include “(Closed)” — for example, “Service Bay 4 (Closed)” — or set it to maintenance mode instead. Reserve deletion for bays that were created in error and have never had a job assigned.
Bay naming best practices
Clear, functional bay names reduce advisor errors and improve the readability of the calendar grid. When advisors are booking jobs under time pressure, names like “Bay 4” force them to remember which number maps to which capability. Names like “Tire Bay” or “Paint Booth 1” make the right choice obvious.
Name bays by their primary function, not by number alone. Good examples: “Paint Booth 1”, “Service Bay 3”, “Tire Bay”, “Body Prep – East”, “Spray Booth – Waterborne”, “Electrical Diagnostics”. If you have multiple bays of the same type, add a number suffix. Avoid generic names like “Bay 1” or “Workshop A” — they are meaningless to an advisor who did not set them up. At Santos Body Works in São Paulo, bays are named “Chapeação 1”, “Chapeação 2”, “Pintura”, “Funilaria”, “Mecânica”, and “Pneus”, making the correct assignment self-evident from the job type alone.
Common questions
Can I rename a bay without affecting existing jobs? Yes. Renaming a bay updates its label everywhere in the application — including on existing jobs — immediately after saving. The underlying job assignments are preserved.
Can the same bay appear in multiple locations? No. Bays are scoped to a single location. If you manage multiple workshop locations, each location has its own independent bay list. Use the location selector to switch between them.
How many bays can I have? There is no hard cap on the number of bays per location. However, your subscription plan may include a limit on the number of bays that count towards your billing tier. Check Settings → Plan for details specific to your account.
A bay shows “Maintenance” on the calendar but I did not set that. What happened? Only users with Location Manager, Org Admin, or Account Owner roles can toggle maintenance status. Check with your team — another manager may have set it. The maintenance status and who changed it is visible in the bay audit log (Settings → Bays → view history icon).