Two weeks ago we had a whiteboard session live over the interweb with our customers (you!). Here’s a summary of what we talked about:

Improving Workorders

Workorder improvements are our #1 priority. So look for system updates with improvements soon. Three main issues were raised:

1. Speed of entry – having a menu of labor items (common tasks).
2. Tracking of workorder status, employee, and item being worked on (bikes for bike shops)
3. Shops like walking bird forms – so look at the functionality and work flow they provide.

Speed of entry was the main issue raised. Having a customizable menu of labor tasks/items that are predefined. And the ability to select more than one of these tasks at once is needed. After the tasks are added there is the need to set the employee responsible for the task, add notes, etc.
The second biggest issue was customizable statuses. So that shops can define their custom work flow as statuses of the workorders.
Smaller yet still important issues included: hook/location of the item being worked on, make it harder to create duplicate customers (system should tell you if you are creating a customer that already exists), put more customer contact fields on the screen, highlighting of special order items to make them more obvious to mechanics, and a way to add existing special orders for a customer to the workorder.

Price Rules

There weren’t as many problems with price rules as we expected. But one change we want to make is so you can set a price rule to apply to a set of categories, manufacturers, etc instead of having to pick particular items the price rule applies to. So it would be easier to apply a price rule to an entire set of items without having to update the price rule when new items are added.
There was some interest in 2-for-1 (or X-for-Y) and Buy-1-Get-1-Free (or Buy-X-Get-Y-Free) pricing.

Other Topics

• Labor button on the register should bring up the labor menu defined for quickly adding labor items to workorders.
• A customizable menu of common items that can be quickly added to a sale.
• Integrating Google Calendar for employee work schedules, repair schedules etc.
• Negative purchase orders – so you can send products back to vendors easily.
• A report that shows sales by item and current quantity on hand side by side so you can more easily decide how much product to re-order.
• Reviews of products that are shared between shops. Also industry trends – like best selling items etc.
• Assembly items pulled from inventory at time of sale.
• Serial numbers tracked per shop for multi-shop accounts.
• A way to make assemblies ad-hoc instead of having a pre-set assembly that you build over and over.
• Ability to have assembly inventory pulled from individual items of the assembly at the time of sale, instead of having to pre-build the assembly ahead of time.

Will We Do This Again? YES

There was general agreement that doing whiteboard sessions like these are a good idea. We’ll try to do another in a few months.

Video of the session:

We forgot to turn on recording until we were already half way through the session, but you can watch the second half of the whiteboard session below: