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Create and use Canned Services

A Canned Service is a saved template for a Service: the labor, parts, Sublets, fees, discounts, and notes for a job you sell often, ready to drop onto an Estimate or Repair Order as one priced unit. Instead of typing out a front brake job line by line for the tenth time this month, an advisor searches the catalog, checks a box, and gets the whole Service. You manage the catalog at Configurations > Operations > Canned services; New-shop onboarding covers picking your first ten, and this page is the full reference.

What a Canned Service holds​

Every Canned Service has a name and a Service Category from your shop's category list. Both are required before you can save. The editor uses the same Service-card rows and editors as the Estimate tab, with the optional Inspection Template picker directly below the card. Labor rows store a description, hours, a base Labor Rate, and an optional manual billed-rate override. Part rows store a brand, part name, part number, quantity and unit, unit cost, retail price, and taxability. Use Move up and Move down in a Part row's three-dot or right-click menu to set the order customers and staff should see. Shop-owned Canned Services can also retain the Inventory Part that supplies the row. Sublet rows store description, cost, customer price, taxability, and customer and internal notes. Fee rows are either snapshots of configured Service Fee Templates or custom fixed fees. Discount rows are chosen from active Service Discount Templates and snapshot that formula into the Canned Service. Notes are text blocks each marked Internal or Customer, and that flag decides whether the text lands in the Service's internal notes or its customer-facing notes when the template is used. The Service card's Tax menu changes taxability by line type, with a mixed state when only some rows of that type are taxable. The card total excludes tax because the destination Shop's live Tax Config calculates tax after the Canned Service is applied.

Create one from scratch​

  1. Open Configurations > Operations > Canned services and click Add Canned Service.
  2. Enter the name in the Service card header, pick a Service Category on the card, and optionally pick an Associated inspection template below it.
  3. Add rows with Add labor and Add part, or the Fee, Discount, Sublet, and Note actions. On a shop-owned Canned Service, Add part offers Inventory and Manual when you have Inventory Parts read access. Organization-owned Canned Services use Manual parts because they have no single shop's inventory context.
  4. Click Save.

Each new Labor Line starts with the scope's default Labor Rate as its base. The displayed billed rate previews the current scope's Labor Markup and changes when hours cross a matrix tier. Click the displayed rate to choose another configured Labor Rate, or type a billed rate to make that row manual; Apply labor markup clears the override. Organization editors preview the Organization default because a destination Shop's override is not known yet.

Choosing Inventory opens the same searchable, multi-select Inventory picker used while building a Service. The selected Inventory Part's identity, description, quantity unit, current FIFO/last cost, and current retail are copied into editable Canned Service rows. The template does not reserve, consume, transfer, or reorder stock. An Inventory label on the row shows that its source identity is still retained; delete it and add a Manual row to detach it.

Save an existing Service as a Canned Service​

The faster way to build the catalog is to notice, mid-estimate, that you just built a job you'll sell again. Open the Service's actions menu on the estimate tab and choose Save as canned service. The dialog suggests a name, a Service category, and a Default labor rate (matched from the Service's own lines when there's exactly one candidate), and shows a count of the labor, parts, Sublets, fees, discounts, and notes it will copy. Adjust the name and pickers, then click Save canned service. The result is a shop-owned Canned Service; the Service you saved it from is unchanged.

Add one to an Estimate​

  1. Click Add service on the Estimate, or on a concern group row to link the new Service to that concern.
  2. Open the Canned service tab.
  3. Search by name, category, line, or note. Check one Canned Service, or several.
  4. Click Add service (or Add N services).

Each selection becomes a full Service with the template's name, category, lines, and notes already in place. From there it behaves like any other Service: edit lines, assign a technician, present it, authorize it. See Build an Estimate with Services, labor, parts, Sublets, fees, and discounts.

What is snapshotted and what is recalculated​

The copy rule from Labor rates, part markup, fees, discounts, and taxes applies to stored Part retail, Sublet retail, Discounts, and Fees. Configured Fee formulas are snapshotted when selected, so later Fee Template edits do not change the Canned Service. An Inventory-selected part also remembers which Inventory Part should supply the future Part Line.

Applying a Canned Service recalculates each automatic labor row with the destination Shop's current Labor Markup. A manual billed-rate override is copied as-is and bypasses markup. Part markup is not rerun. An Inventory-selected row becomes an Inventory-Sourced Part Line using the applying shop's current stock and FIFO cost while keeping the template's stored retail, including an intentional zero-dollar retail. If no stock row exists yet, BayEngine creates the normal zero-quantity default-location row so the shortage remains visible in the parts workflow. If the remembered Inventory Part has since been deactivated, deleted, or is otherwise unavailable, update the Canned Service before using it again. The Service records which Canned Service it came from, but later edits to the template never touch Services already on documents, and edits to a Service never flow back into the template. Each Sublet becomes planned, manually priced, and vendorless; dispatch, Vendor selection, and purchasing happen later on the Repair Order.

AI Estimator sections​

AI Estimator section controls and execution are temporarily unavailable. Canned Services retain their existing estimator flags in stored data, but the flags are currently inert: applying a Canned Service copies all of its stored Labor, Part, Fee, and Note rows.

One catalog for the organization, plus shop-owned templates​

Organization-owned Canned Services are one catalog shared by every shop. They're created and edited in Org view's Canned Services page. A Canned Service created on a shop's own page, or saved from a Service, belongs to that shop alone.

The shop's Configurations > Operations > Canned services list shows both, with a Source column reading Organization, Shop, or Customized from organization. Opening an organization-owned row from the shop page shows it read-only, with two actions:

  • Hide removes the organization template from this shop's list and from its add-service picker. The template itself is untouched and other shops keep it. Hiding removes the row from this shop's list entirely and there's no unhide control in the app yet, so if you hid one by mistake, contact the BayEngine team.
  • Customize creates a shop-owned copy and hides the organization original for this shop, so the list shows only your version. The copy is independent from then on: organization edits to the original no longer reach this shop.

For which other settings work this way, and for what Org view contains, see Organization defaults and shop overrides.

Edit or archive later​

Editing a Canned Service changes what future applications produce and nothing else; every Service already created from it keeps its lines. Archive (on shop-owned templates, or on organization templates in Org view) removes it from the list and the picker the same way. Archiving the organization copy removes it from every shop that hadn't customized it. Documents that used it are untouched.

Permissions​

Canned Services have their own permission resource, canned_services, with separate read, create, update, and delete actions. A shop-scoped read grant shows the Canned Services page and the Canned service tab in the add-service dialog; without it the page leaves the sidebar and the tab is disabled. Create covers adding templates, Save as canned service, and Customize; delete covers Archive and Hide. Managing the organization catalog in Org view takes the same actions granted at the organization scope. Applying a Canned Service to a document also requires create permission on that Estimate or Repair Order. How to grant any of these is covered in Assign Shop Roles, shop access, and User Permissions.