Configure and perform Inspections

An Inspection is a digital checklist a technician fills out on one repair order: each task on the checklist gets a rating, findings text, and photos or video. The checklists themselves are Inspection Templates, built once under Configurations > Operations > Inspection templates and reused on every visit. This page covers building templates and taking an inspection from added to completed. Recording findings and media in depth is covered in Record Technician Findings, notes, and media, and getting results in front of the customer in Send Estimates and Inspections to customers.

Every task takes one of four ratings: Good (green), Attention (amber), Critical (red), or Not applicable (gray). A task nobody has touched shows Not inspected. Attention and Critical do more than color a row; each one becomes a Technician Concern on the repair order, which is how inspection results turn into recommended work. More on that below.

Create an Inspection Template

Templates live under Configurations > Operations > Inspection templates. A template belongs either to one shop or to the whole organization: the shop page creates shop templates, and the Org view has its own Operations > Inspection templates tab whose templates are usable at every shop. A shop's list shows both. See Organization defaults and shop overrides for how org-owned configuration works generally.

Click Add inspection to open the Create inspection template dialog. It asks for three things:

• A name, like "Multi-point inspection" or "Brake inspection."
• Visible to customer by default controls whether inspections made from this template can be shared with the customer. Leave it off for internal-only checklists (a quality-control sheet, for example); those inspections never send and never appear on the customer portal.
• Automatically add to repair orders, covered in the auto-add section below.

Create the template and BayEngine opens its editor. Edit on the details card changes the name and both checkboxes later.

Build sections and tasks

A template is sections of tasks. A section is a heading that groups related tasks ("Exterior," "Under hood," "Tires and brakes"); a task is one line the technician rates ("Front brake pad thickness"). The editor's Inspection sections card is where you build both.

1. Click Add section and name it.
2. Type the first task into the row that appears. The placeholder asks the right question: what should the technician inspect?
3. Press Enter to add the next task and keep typing. Add task does the same by mouse.
4. Drag the grip handles to reorder sections, or tasks within a section.
5. Click Save.

Save requires at least one section, a name on every section, and at least one task per section; blank task rows are dropped when you save. The pencil and trash icons beside a section heading rename or delete it, and deleting a section takes its tasks with it.

Each save publishes a new version of the template, and an inspection pins the version that was current when it was added to a repair order. So edit freely: reworking your checklist never rewrites an inspection a technician is halfway through, and completed inspections keep showing exactly what was checked at the time.

Auto-add templates

A template with Automatically add to repair orders checked creates its inspection on every repair order made from the Create repair order page, before anyone opens it. Any number of templates can have it on, at either scope; the repair order gets one inspection per auto-add template, the shop's own plus the organization's.

Repair orders created by converting an appointment or an Estimate do not run auto-add. For those, add the inspection yourself from the Inspections tab, as noted in Check in a vehicle and record visit details.

Add an Inspection to a repair order

The repair order's Inspections tab lists the visit's inspections as cards, in an order you can change by dragging their grip handles. Add inspection opens a picker of every active template with a published version, shop and organization both; click one and its inspection appears with every task unrated. The trash icon on a card deletes that inspection, after a confirmation. Once the repair order is invoiced, inspections lock along with the rest of it.

Perform the Inspection

Performing inspections is technician work; the technician learning path starts here. The select in the card header assigns the inspection to a technician, separately from the repair order's own assignments.

Each section renders as a table: task name, the four rating buttons, a findings field, and media. Work down the list:

1. Click a rating for each task. Clicking Attention or Critical is the signal to say why.
2. Type what you found in the findings field. It autosaves as you type; the header flashes "Autosaved" so you never hunt for a save button.
3. Attach photos or video to the task. Media handling, annotation, and size limits are covered in Record Technician Findings, notes, and media.

Every Attention or Critical rating creates a Technician Concern under Technician findings on the Estimate tab, carrying the rating and the findings text (or the task name until findings are written). Change the rating or the findings and the concern follows; move the task back to Good or Not applicable and the concern goes away. Those concerns are what the service advisor builds recommended services from; see Build an Estimate with Services, labor, parts, Sublets, fees, and discounts.

Complete and reopen

When the checklist is done, click Mark complete. If tasks are still unrated, a dialog says how many and offers Mark complete anyway; an unrated task simply stays "Not inspected" in the results. A completed inspection is read-only. Reopen unlocks it again if the technician missed something, and it can be completed again after.

An inspection moves through five statuses: not started, in progress, completed, sent to customer, and customer viewed. Completing is not sending. The first Send on the Inspections tab publishes every completed, customer-visible, not-yet-sent inspection at once. The button stays available afterward so the Shop can Text, Email, or Copy the same results again. What Send delivers and what the customer sees is covered in Send Estimates and Inspections to customers.

Permissions

Everything on this page runs on the inspections resource. Read shows templates and inspections; create adds them; update covers rating tasks, recording findings, and completing or reopening; delete removes them. Template editing uses the same resource, so a shop-scoped grant manages that shop's templates and an org-wide grant is needed for organization templates. The Technician role's default permissions at invite time cover performing inspections. See Assign Shop Roles, shop access, and User Permissions.