In this article we look at how to optimise your system to make creating workshop jobs easier, and help increase productivity as a result.

Workshop Department & Categories

By default, your Cloud POS group will have been created with a department of 'Workshop' and within this, four categories:

• Labour Individual
• Labour Services
• Labour Timed
• Miscellaneous Workshop

This enables you to differentiate between the types of labour you might use in the workshop.

You can create new categories if applicable, but the default categories are a basis from which to start.

Setting up Workshop Items

It's a good idea to aim for all of your different tasks within the workshop to be set up as individual items in your Cloud POS database.

The easiest way to do this, is to make a list of all of the most common tasks you would do in the workshop.  Next, put them in the ideal order you would tackle them, if you were doing them as one big job.

As they are services rather than items you hold in stock, create these tasks as individual Non-Inventory Items, making sure that you allocate them into their correct Department and Categories.

Set each Item's price accordingly for the amount you will charge to complete that particular task.

You can also give each Workshop task an approximate timeframe for how long it takes for the mechanic to complete the task, to help with scheduling jobs in the Workshop Calendar. To do this, click on the Advanced tab and fill in the Workshop Minutes field. There are also buttons underneath that you can click on to quickly choose a common time period e.g. 30 Minutes, 60 Minutes, 90 Minutes or 120 Minutes.

Assembly Items

With your individual labour items created, you can now create Assembly Items to group those individual items together.  This enables you to build up larger jobs comprising of each of the smaller tasks.  

By grouping using Assembly Items, you only need to add one item to POS, rather than a number of items separately.  As well as saving time, this also removes the need for the cashier to remember each individual task involved in a larger job.

In the example below, we are creating an Assembly Item comprising of all the tasks we will carry out as part of the Bronze Service.

When creating an Assembly Item, we have the option to set a custom total assembly price, which means that we can specify what we intend to charge for this service. This is what we've done in the example above, where the total cost of all the individual tasks totals £80.00 but we have specified that we will charge £60.00.  Each item has then been automatically discounted to allow us to reach our specified price.

If preferred, there is the option to leave the Assembly Item so that its price equals the total full price of all the individual jobs it contains.

At the Point of Sale, we now just need to add the item BRONZESERV to the transaction, rather than each item individually:

This has the effect of adding each item within that Assembly Item into the transaction, which can then be converted into a Workshop Job:

In the Workshop Module, we can now generate a job sheet for the mechanic to work through, as below:

So, we can see that by spending some initial time preparing the system, this will benefit us in the long-run.  We can create workshop jobs more easily and accurately, and this in turn will help us to increase productivity both at the point of sale and in the workshop itself.