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

Departments and 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.

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.

Prefixing the item lookup codes with numbers in descending order can be beneficial, as this will enable you to create services with the individual tasks in numerical order.  

The mechanic can then work through the list of tasks, ticking them off once each step is completed.  For example:

1LABFHS        Labour Front Hub Service

2LABAFHC     Labour Adjust Front Hub Cones

3LABTFW       Labour True Front Wheel

4LABAHS       Labour Adjust Headset

5LABSHS       Labour Service Headset

6LABRFF        Labour Remove Forks

If you plan to offer different levels of servicing (Bronze Service / Silver Service / Gold Service, for example), create these as Non Inventory items too, assigning them to the 'Workshop' department and 'Labour Services' category.

This will allow you to report correctly on sales of these services.

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.  Note that we have added the 'Workshop Bronze Service' item into the Assembly Item - this is so we can report on sales of that service.

When creating an Assembly Item, we have the option to set a customised 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 £120.00 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 BRONZESERVICE 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.