Manage workload, waiting-for-parts, and holdover work

The Workflow board is a live inventory of every open Repair Order, not a daily to-do list. A repair order stays on the board, in whatever stage it sits, until the vehicle is marked picked up, the visit is closed without a sale, or the repair order is deleted. Invoice and payment status do not remove or lock its card. That makes the board only as honest as the habits behind it: work that stalls on parts, spans several days, or quietly piles up looks exactly like work that is moving unless someone keeps the stages and Promise Times true. This page covers those habits and the features that back them. For the mechanics of dragging cards, see Move work through workflow stages; for the stage list itself, see Workflow stages and operational defaults.

What a board card tells you about workload

Each card shows the customer (first initial and last name) with the Visit Type icon, the vehicle, the RO number, the total labor hours beside a wrench icon, the Promise Time beside a clock icon when one is set, and a work progress bar that fills as labor lines are checked off. The labor hours sum every labor line on the repair order's services except hidden and declined ones, matching the Estimate tab's proposed-work scope, so proposed and authorized hours both count.

Stages marked User-specific split into a lane per technician plus an Unassigned lane, based on each repair order's assigned technician. That is the board's workload view: a glance down a technician's row shows every job they own across Inspection, Estimation, Waiting on Parts, and Work In Progress, with the hours on each card. See Assign service advisors and technicians for how cards land in a lane.

What the board does not show: there is no total of hours per lane or stage, no card count per column, and no indicator of how long a card has sat in its stage. A repair order that has been in Estimation for six days looks identical to one that arrived an hour ago. The stage history exists (every move is logged in the RO's Activity), but no card surface reads it. Until an aging indicator exists, the working substitute is the Promise Time on each card: it is the one visible date, and a promise in the past is the board's only built-in sign that something has stalled. That makes setting real Promise Times, covered in Set the Reason For Visit, Visit Type, odometer, and Promise Time, a workload tool and not just a customer courtesy.

Waiting on Parts is a stage you move, not an automation

The default board ships with a Waiting on Parts stage between Customer Approval and Work In Progress. Nothing moves a repair order into or out of it automatically: ordering parts does not move the card, and neither does receiving them. Stage moves are always a person dragging the card (or picking a stage on the repair order page), and each move is recorded in the RO's Activity.

So the recommended routine is simple and manual:

1. When authorized work stops because parts are not in hand, drag the card to Waiting on Parts. The stage is per-technician by default, so the job stays visibly owned while it waits.
2. When the parts arrive, drag it back to Work In Progress.

Step 2 has help. Receiving vendor parts against a purchase order tied to a repair order creates a task, "Parts in for RO [number] - start work", assigned to the repair order's technician (or claimable by any technician when none is assigned). Partial receipts collapse into one task per repair order, so three deliveries do not create three pings. The task tells the technician the wait is over; moving the card is still their job. This comes from the Start work after parts arrive automation, one of the task automations every shop starts with, active out of the box and pausable on the Automations page.

The same pack includes Order parts for authorized work: when a customer authorizes a service that has vendor-sourced parts, the service advisor gets a task to order them. Between those two tasks, the gap where a card sits in Waiting on Parts with nothing actually on order is a lot harder to fall into.

Follow the parts themselves

Whether the wait is real is a parts question, and the board cannot answer it. The repair order's Parts tab is the source of truth: it shows which parts need sourcing or ordering, which are on order or backordered, which have been received, and which need return handling. A card in Waiting on Parts whose Parts tab says "Needs sourcing" or "Ready to order" is not waiting on a vendor; it is waiting on you. This is also where staff prepare Purchase Orders or place eligible PartsTech orders.

Quoting, ordering, and receiving are covered in the Parts, Orders, and Inventory section of this knowledge base; for how Promise Time guides work prioritization, see Set the Reason For Visit, Visit Type, odometer, and Promise Time.

Tasks are the follow-up mechanism

The Tasks page in the sidebar is where stalled work resurfaces as something a person is supposed to do. The sidebar entry shows the number of open tasks assigned directly to you. When none are assigned to you but the Unassigned tab contains work you can claim, it shows a numberless red dot. Each Task has a title, a description, a priority section (Urgent, High, Normal, or Low), when it was created, and usually an expanded action that opens the record it is about: the Repair Order, Estimate, Customer, or Purchase Order.

A task is assigned in one of two ways: to a specific person, or to a role pool (Service Advisor, Technician, or Shop Administrator). A pool task is visible to everyone holding that role at the Shop. Use Claim to take ownership while leaving it open, or check it off to claim and complete it in one step. After a manual claim, only the owner can mark it complete. The default automations prefer the specific person, and fall back to the pool only when the repair order has no advisor or technician assigned, so keeping assignments current keeps tasks off the shared pile.

Two honest limits. Tasks have no due date and no reminder; an open task sits in the list until someone marks it done, with nothing escalating as it ages. Staff can use Add task to create standalone work or link it to a Repair Order, but the Task still cannot be scheduled. A promise like "call Mrs. Alvarez Thursday about the backordered compressor" can be a manually created Task with the day written in its title or description, but it will not alert anyone on Thursday. See Add notes and maintain the repair order for where longer-lived Repair Order notes go.

Holdover work

Nothing marks a repair order as staying overnight. There is no holdover flag, no end-of-day sweep, and no separate view of vehicles still in the building; a multi-day job is simply an open repair order whose card is still on the board tomorrow. The honest routine has two parts:

• Set the Promise Time to the day the vehicle will actually be ready. The picker in the Visit Details card lets you choose a different day, and every change is logged in Activity, so moving a promise from Tuesday to Thursday is a recorded decision, not a quiet slip. Tell the customer when you move it; BayEngine will not.
• Leave the card in the stage that reflects reality. A vehicle held overnight for parts belongs in Waiting on Parts, not parked in Work In Progress where its lane suggests someone is turning wrenches on it.

Because cards persist until the repair order leaves the board, holdover work needs no ceremony, only truthfulness. The failure mode is the opposite one: a finished repair order lingering in Ready for Pickup for a week because the customer has not shown up. That is real, the customer genuinely owes a pickup, and the card belongs there; see Complete, cancel, restore, print, or prepare a repair order for invoicing for how repair orders actually leave the board.

A daily board sweep

Since no report or alert does this yet, the working routine in most shops is a short sweep of the board at a fixed time each day, usually first thing in the morning:

1. Scan Promise Times stage by stage. Anything past due or due today gets a decision now: finish it, move the promise and tell the customer, or escalate.
2. Open the Parts tab on every card in Waiting on Parts. "Needs sourcing" means quote it, "Ready to order" means order it, "Backordered" means call the vendor or re-source, and "Received" means the card should not be in this stage.
3. Check the Tasks page and claim what is yours from the pools.
4. Compare lanes. With no per-lane hour totals, the card counts and hours in each technician's row are the capacity picture; rebalance assignments before the day starts, and keep today's intake in mind from the appointment calendar (Configure scheduling availability caps concurrent appointments, but nothing connects that cap to the board's open workload).

Ten minutes of this keeps the board honest. Every correction it produces (a stage move, a promise change, an order placed) is logged on the repair order, so Track service progress and work time and the Activity log can tell you afterward what actually happened while the work waited.