Bookings and the diary
The Booking Diary plans the work that is booked in but has not arrived yet. It organises bookings by appointment date and shows how the day's load sits against your shop capacity.
Bookings are capacity commitments, not minute-by-minute appointments. You plan the day, then triage and sequence the cards operationally as vehicles come in.
Appointment date versus due-in
These two dates answer different questions:
- Appointment date is the day the booking is planned for. It anchors the diary.
- Due-in is the time you expect the customer to drop the vehicle off that day.
Due-in tells the customer when to bring the car in. The workshop still decides the order in which it works the day's cards.
Capacity is shown per day
The diary day header shows the available hours derived from your Shop Calendar: opening hours, breaks, public holidays, and any closures. This is the denominator you plan allocated hours against.
Carryover work
A normal repair order that has to stay onsite for parts or capacity can carry an internal expected completion date when its due-out is set to carryover. The diary can show that as an all-day span so you keep forward visibility, without converting the job into a long-running project.
Cancel a booking
A service advisor can cancel a booking before the vehicle arrives. Cancellation is a soft outcome on the same repair order, not a deletion.
- Open the booking from the diary or Arrivals.
- Choose to cancel the booking and record the reason.
- The booking leaves the operational boards and capacity views.
The repair order, customer, vehicle, services, and number are all kept. The cancelled record stays visible in history and customer records, so you keep the audit trail and the customer's reliability context.
Cancelling and rebooking are pre-arrival only
You can cancel or rebook a booking only before the vehicle has arrived, before any intake authorisation is signed or overridden, and before work has started. Once the vehicle is in, those paths close.
Rebook to another day
Rebooking moves the same booking to a new appointment date. It keeps the same repair order, so the customer, vehicle, services, parts, notes, and number all carry across, and the booked work moves to the new day with it. Nothing is duplicated and capacity is not double-counted.