Shop settings

Settings holds everything you configure once and rarely touch again: your shop’s identity, invoice defaults, time zone, scheduling hours, and tax rates. This article covers the Shop details, Scheduling, and Tax rates sections.

Open Settings from the sidebar. Sections sit in a rail on the left: Shop details, Scheduling, Staff, Tax rates, Payments & plan, and Your data. Staff is covered in Staff and roles; Payments & plan in Getting paid online; the subscription and the data export in Billing and your data.

Role note: most of Settings is Owner-only. An Advisor who opens Settings sees just the Scheduling section; a Technician does not see Settings at all.

Shop details

Shop details. Everything here saves together with the one Save settings button — nothing changes until you click it.

To update your shop details:

1. Open Settings. The Shop details section is the first one.
2. Edit the fields you want to change.
3. Click Save settings.

What each field does:

• Shop name — shown in the sidebar and printed on your documents.
• Phone and Address — your letterhead. It prints on your invoices and appears on the estimate approval page the customer opens.
• Default labor rate ($/hr) — prefills the rate on new labor lines in the estimate builder, where rate × hours suggests the line price. Leave it blank for no prefill; either way the rate on any line stays editable.
• Time zone — the zone your shop’s business day runs in. New shops start on Eastern time; the picker lists the US time zones.
• Invoice terms — free text (warranty, liability, storage fees) printed at the bottom of every invoice, up to 2,000 characters.
• Require a technician on every labor line before invoicing — when checked, you cannot generate an invoice until each labor line has a technician assigned. Lines on declined jobs are ignored.

Note: invoice terms are locked into each invoice when you generate it. Editing the text here changes future invoices only — an invoice you have already issued keeps the terms it was printed with. The same is true of your letterhead. See Invoices and payments.

The time zone and your reports

Report days, weeks, and months start at midnight in the shop’s time zone — so Today on the Reports screen means today at your counter, not somewhere else. The zone belongs to the shop, not to whoever is looking: every staff member sees the same numbers.

Note: changing the time zone moves the boundary of every report range, including periods you have already looked at. A figure you checked yesterday can read slightly differently after the change, because the day now starts and ends at a different moment.

Scheduling

The Scheduling section sets the day window the appointment board displays — Day starts at and Day ends at, in 15-minute steps. It is display-only: booking an appointment outside the window is still allowed, and the board extends to show it.

These two selects save as you change them — there is no save button in this section.

Role note: Scheduling is the one section an Advisor can edit. Everything else in this article is Owner-only.

Tax rates

Tax in BayDocket is a set of named rates you define, plus a default for parts and a default for labor. Every new part line uses the parts default and every new labor line uses the labor default, unless the customer or the repair order is tax-exempt. A rate of 0% is how you say “non-taxable” — there is no separate on/off switch.

Tax rates. The table lists your named rates with their percentages and default badges; the Default rates card below picks the parts and labor defaults.

Add a rate

1. Open Settings, then Tax rates.
2. Click Add rate.
3. Enter a New rate label (for example Parts tax) and a Rate (%) (for example 8.25). Use 0 for a non-taxable rate.
4. Click Add rate.

A new shop starts with one rate, created at signup, set as both defaults.

Set the defaults

In the Default rates card, pick a Default parts tax rate and a Default labor tax rate, then click Save defaults. They can be the same rate or different ones — a common setup is taxed parts and 0% labor.

Change or archive a rate

Click Edit on a rate’s row to open it inline. From there you can Rename it, change its percentage and click Update rate, or Archive it. Done closes the editor.

Rates are archived, never deleted. An archived rate disappears from the pickers, but anything that already references it keeps working. You cannot archive a rate while it is still one of the two defaults — pick new defaults first, then archive.

Note: a rate change never rewrites an invoice you have already generated — tax is calculated and frozen when the invoice is issued, and the invoice shows its own per-rate breakdown. An open estimate picks up the new rate the next time any of its lines change.

Tax-exempt customers

A customer who never pays sales tax is marked on their customer record, not here — check Tax exempt on the customer record and every line on their repair orders computes at 0% regardless of the rate defaults.

One tax-free repair order

For a single visit, use the tax chip on the repair order’s summary card instead: click the chip on the Tax row to flip it to Exempt, and click again to undo it. This affects only that repair order.

If the chip already reads Exempt and cannot be clicked, the customer is tax-exempt at the customer level — that overrides everything, and you would clear it on their customer record, not on the repair order.

Who can change what

• Owner — everything on this page: shop details, invoice terms, labor rate, time zone, tax rates and defaults, plus the Staff, Payments & plan, and Your data sections.
• Advisor — the scheduling day window only. Advisors can still set a customer’s tax-exempt flag and the per-repair-order exempt chip, since those live on the customer and the repair order rather than in Settings.
• Technician — no access to Settings.

Tip: if a setting you expect is missing, check the small label next to the Shop settings title — it shows the role you are signed in as.