How to book a job or change a booking?
Your diary is the heart of your workshop. A full diary means more $$$ for your workshop, but an over-filled diary means delays for customers and stress for you and your team. So we've crafted the SAM diary with multiple views, to help you organise your workshop the way you prefer - each view covered in separate sections in the table of contents below.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The different views can be accessed using the following icons displayed in the Dashboard, Quick Links widget or from the Workshop, Diary menu.
Drag & Drop - Bookings can be 'Drag n Dropped' between technicians, and in the Timeline views you can drag the job into different time-slots. You can also drag the top of bottom edge of a booking to give it more or less time.
Month View
This view displays a Capacity bar and Hours Available to be booked for each day. We've colour coded the capacity so the calendar works like a chart, scaling from Green (plenty of capacity left) to Red (little/no capacity left).
Hovering the mouse over the capacity bar will display total technician hours for the day, the number of technicians working, job hours booked and the number of jobs booked for the day. If you want to drill down into a particular day, just double-click on the capacity bar for that day.
To check out the previous/next month, just select the ◀️ ▶️ next to the month and year.
Note - Re Capacity - We've added this to some of the Diary views to help you get a quick feel for your workload/availability. This is calculated based on the tehnician availibility you have set up and the Estimated Hours defined within the jobs, so this needs to be accurate to give you an accurate Capacity measurement.
Week View
The week view is great for Monday mornings when you want to get a good sense of what's going to happen this week. You can see details like the number of technicians on duty, the number of jobs and hours available for the day, as well as the bookings and notes for this day (e.g. - "Bob is away training" or "wedding anniversary, buy flowers").
If your customer rings up and wants to change to another day, just drag and drop their booking to the new date.
To drill down on a specific day, or to Create New Job, just click on any white space on that day, which will also give you the Select Job option if you want to select an existing job for this day:
The top menu bar is used to scroll the view to different dates or use the Search function to quickly find a booking within the week displayed.
There are settings to filter the week display and help you to focus on what you really care about. The "Auto Refresh" function can also be turned on if you want the most up-to-date capacity information, at all times.
To drill down into a particular job, just double-click the booking and it will open a summary booking/Job screen where you can see the details and make changes if needed.
No more bookings please!! If you know you can't commit to any more work on a certain day, regardless of the "Capacity" displayed, you can click a specific day in the Week Scheduler, or into any slot on the Day Schedulers and Mark As Fully Booked which will display a message to alert staff not to book any more jobs for the selected day. Clicking the same spot will give you the option to Unmark as Fully Booked...
Day Scheduler - With Timeline
This view is great for the start of each morning and for managing your work during the day. You can use this view to brief the crew on what they'll be working on, allocate jobs to different technicians just by drag 'n' drop (or stretch out the time you've allocated for jobs that are taking a bit longer...).
You can see what the technician is currently clocked onto, displayed next to their name e.g. Bob is working on Job 1030 and Jimmy is cleaning the workshop.
If you have jobs with no technician assigned, they are displayed in the "Unallocated" column. Assigning unallocated jobs to technicians is simple, just drag them to the right technician.
Slow Day Scheduler View? If you're running an exceptionally busy workshop, you may find the Day Schedulers open slowly. You can speed this up (at the expense of making it slightly slower to toggle back/forward to other dates) by clicking the Cog icon (top-right) and selecting the 'One Day at a Time' Load Method:
Day Scheduler - No Timeline
If you prefer to run a workshop without the pressure of doing things by the clock, you can use the day scheduler with no timeline, which has all the same options as the one "with timeline", except you can't expand the job to increase the estimated hours.
TIP: Update the Job Status... We recommend that you set the Job Status to "Booked" when creating new bookings, or you can set your system to assign the "Booked" Job Status as the default within Setup > System Configuration > Workshop Setup
Technicians can have Sort Orders applied, which will change the order in which the display in the Diary Day Scheduler and Technician Availability screens. This is done in Setup > Maintenance > Technicians
Multi Day Jobs
It is important to note that if you drag and drop a 'multi day booking' to different tech, you may need to use the 'allocate technician hours' to ensure all days are moved to the appropriate tech. Also the default technician showing against a job would be the technician assigned to the first day of the multi day job.
Now that you're familiar with our diary, you can:
? Need more help?
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