Understand vehicle ownership, service history, and historical invoices
A Vehicle in BayEngine is one physical vehicle with one current Customer. The record belongs to your whole organization, not to a single shop, and it sits at the shop of the customer who currently has it. Service history and odometer readings follow the vehicle for life, including when it changes owners. Estimates, Repair Orders, Invoices, payments, and balances work the other way: they stay with the customer who authorized the work. This page explains that model, where a vehicle's history shows up, who can see it, and how to pull up a past invoice.
One vehicle, one current customer
Every Vehicle sits on exactly one customer's page at a time. There is no shared or joint ownership, and no separate "vehicle file" outside a customer record; selecting a Vehicle in Search opens the Customer that currently has it.
When a car is sold, inherited, or was simply filed under the wrong person, you move the record with a transfer. The Vehicle keeps its identity, history, and odometer readings, and moves to the new customer's shop; the documents already on the books keep their original Customer. How to run one, and what blocks it, is covered in Transfer a vehicle to another customer.
The model only works if one physical car is one record. Two records for the same car split its history in half, which is why the app checks VIN and plate at entry and offers a merge; see Find and resolve duplicate customers or vehicles.
What counts as service history
A vehicle's history panel shows its invoice-finalized Repair Order visits across every shop in your organization. Each history entry is one past visit: the RO number, the invoice date, the odometer reading, and its Services. Condensed visits list only authorized completed Services. Expanded visits show completed Services with their invoiced labor and parts, plus explicitly labeled reviewed, non-hidden declined Services with their quoted labor and parts.
That definition has edges worth knowing. An open Repair Order is not history yet; it appears once its Invoice is finalized. Reviewed declined Services that were not hidden appear only in the expanded visit and are never presented as completed work. A Repair Order closed without sale produces no Invoice, so the visit shows in the customer's document list but adds nothing to the vehicle's service history.
Where to see a vehicle's history
On any Repair Order or Estimate page, the Vehicle history button in the right-hand rail opens a panel with every past visit for that vehicle, newest first. Expand a visit to see completed Services' labor and parts alongside declined Services' quoted labor and parts. The search box at the top matches service names, labor descriptions, part names, brands, and part numbers, so "brakes" or a part number finds the visit you're after. The arrow icon on a visit opens that Repair Order.
The panel is also where warranty work starts: Create warranty service appears on completed Services when the old visit was at your shop for the same customer, and adds linked warranty work to the Estimate or Repair Order you are currently viewing. Declined Services do not offer this action.
The customer's page shows the rest of the picture. Each vehicle card lists the last visit date and current odometer, and the History card lists every Estimate, Repair Order, and Counter Sale for that customer at the active shop with status, total, and payment state. To see service history for one vehicle, open one of its Repair Orders or Estimates and use the rail panel.
Who can see history, including across shops
Opening a vehicle's service history requires read permission for both Vehicles and Repair Orders covering the shop where the vehicle originated. Once open, the history lists finalized visits from every shop in the organization, so a multi-shop operation sees the whole car, not one location's slice of it. Opening one of those Repair Orders still requires Repair Order read access at the shop that wrote it.
Staff who float between shops should hold their grants at the organization scope: one org-wide grant covers every shop, and it is also what lets Search return customers and vehicles that originated at your other shops. How to grant either scope is in Assign Shop Roles, shop access, and User Permissions.
What an ownership change does to history
After a transfer, the vehicle and its full history belong to the new owner. Staff serving the new owner see every pre-transfer visit in the Vehicle history panel, including work the previous owner paid for; that's the point, since the car's maintenance record matters more than who held the title when the timing belt was done.
The paperwork stays put. Past Invoices remain attributed to the customer who authorized the work, with their line items, totals, and the shop's customer-facing identity frozen from the moment of finalization. The previous owner's History card still lists all of their documents and balances; only the vehicle card moves to the new owner's page, so the Vehicle column on those old rows shows a dash. Opening the Repair Order itself still shows which vehicle it was for.
Find a past invoice for a vehicle
An Invoice lives on its Repair Order, so finding the invoice means finding the RO. Three routes:
- From the vehicle: open any of its Repair Orders or Estimates, open Vehicle history in the right rail, and use the arrow icon on the visit you want. On that Repair Order's Payment tab, Print Invoice opens the invoice PDF for viewing or printing.
- From the Documents page: select the Repair Orders tab, set the status filter to Invoiced or Paid, and search. The search box matches customer names, vehicle names, and document numbers, and the Finalized column carries the invoice date.
- From the customer: the History card on their page lists every document with its date and payment state; open the Repair Order and print from the Payment tab.
Customers have their own copy. Each visit's Portal Link shows the finalized invoice in the portal's documents section, where the customer can download the PDF. The portal covers one visit only; there is no customer-facing account history across visits.
History from before BayEngine
Service history is not imported from other systems, so a vehicle's history in BayEngine starts with its first visit written here. "Historical invoices" on this page always means invoices finalized in BayEngine. Records from your old system stay in your old system, and the standard advice is to keep it readable for lookups during the transition; the cutover pattern is covered in Initial data imports and migration.