Appointments

The Schedule page is the shop’s appointment calendar: a day board with one column per staff member, a week overview, and a phone agenda. An appointment holds a customer, an optional vehicle, a time slot, and the concern — and when the car shows up, one click turns it into a repair order.

The day board

Open Schedule from the sidebar and you land on today’s board. The left gutter marks the hours of the working day; every active staff member gets a column, with an Unassigned column first for bookings nobody owns yet. The arrow buttons and Today move between days, and the Day / Week toggle switches views.

The day board. ① The Unassigned column — bookings without a technician land here. ② An appointment card: start time, customer, vehicle, concern. ③ + Appointment opens the booking form.

A few things the board does on its own:

• When you are viewing today, a line marks the current time and the board scrolls to it when it opens.
• Two appointments can share a time — the cards sit side by side in the column. BayDocket never blocks a double booking; overbooking is your call to make.
• Card color follows status: Arrived cards get a green edge, No-show cards dim, Canceled cards dim and strike through. All of them stay on the board, so the day’s plan stays honest.

Booking an appointment

1. Click + Appointment.
2. Find the customer: type a name in Find customer, click Find, and pick from the results. For a new customer, skip the search and enter a Customer name (phone and email optional) — the customer record is created with the booking.
3. Pick a Vehicle, or leave it at None yet. A vehicle is optional until you start the repair order.
4. Set the Date, the Time (15-minute steps), and a Duration — presets from 30 min to 2 hours, or Custom… for anything else in 15-minute steps.
5. Pick a Technician, or leave the appointment Unassigned.
6. Type the customer’s Concern and click Save.

The booking form. The customer search reuses your existing records — see Customers and vehicles.

Tip: duration is free-form, not slot-locked. A 45-minute oil change and a six-hour diagnosis are both one appointment; the card’s height on the board reflects it.

Rearranging the day

On desktop, the board is drag-and-drop:

• Drag a card up or down to reschedule it. The drop snaps to 15-minute steps.
• Drop a card in another column to reassign it to that person (or back to Unassigned).
• Drag a card’s bottom edge to change its duration.

Each drop saves immediately and flashes Saved ✓ on the card.

Dragging a card to another column to reassign it, then down the day to reschedule — about 15 seconds.

If you would rather not drag, open the card instead — the detail panel has the same moves as pickers.

The appointment detail

Click any card to open its detail panel: the time range, customer, vehicle, technician, concern, and status, plus everything you can do to it.

The detail panel. Status actions on top, the Reassign and Reschedule pickers below, Start RO at the bottom.

• Status buttons — mark the appointment Arrived, No-show, or Cancel it. Only the legal moves show; Mark Booked undoes a status set by mistake.
• Edit — change the vehicle, technician, date, time, duration, concern, or notes, then Save.
• Reassign — pick a person from the list; the change applies as soon as you pick.
• Reschedule — set a new date and time, then click Move.
• Start RO — turn the appointment into a repair order (next section).

Note: canceling never deletes an appointment. The card stays on its day, struck through, and the booking stays in your records — there is no way to delete an appointment, only to cancel it.

Turning an arrival into a repair order

When the car shows up:

1. Open the appointment and click Start RO.
2. If the appointment has no vehicle yet, the panel asks you to pick one from the customer’s vehicles, then click Confirm & start RO.
3. BayDocket creates the repair order and opens it in the estimate builder, with the customer and vehicle already attached. The appointment is marked Arrived and linked to the new repair order.

Converting is one-shot: a converted appointment shows Converted to RO. and cannot be converted again or moved back to Booked — the repair order now carries the work. From here the flow is the same as any walk-in; see Your first repair order.

Tip: walk-ins do not need an appointment at all. New repair order in the sidebar skips the schedule entirely.

The week view

Switch the toggle to Week for a Monday-to-Sunday overview: seven columns of compact cards in time order. Click a day’s header to open that day’s board. Dragging a card into another day’s column reschedules it to the same time on that day.

On a phone

At phone widths the board becomes an agenda list — one day at a time, cards grouped by hour, with the assigned person on a chip. There is no drag on a phone; tap a card to open the same detail sheet and use the Reassign and Reschedule pickers instead. + Appointment stays at the top, so booking from the counter phone works the same way.

The phone agenda. Tap a card for the detail sheet — statuses, reassign, reschedule, and Start RO.

The board’s day window

The hours the board shows by default come from Settings: under Scheduling, set Day starts at and Day ends at (7:00 AM to 6:00 PM out of the box). This is display-only — a 6:00 AM drop-off is a perfectly legal booking, and the board simply extends to show it. See Shop settings.

Role note: booking, editing, dragging, status changes, and Start RO are Owner and Advisor actions. A Technician sees the full schedule read-only — no + Appointment button, no drag, no status buttons.