Manager Forum

It's dimmed out because once again, the CJ will transfer to the Order screen and immediately read that particular customer's (or vehicle) labor 'Type' set.

Let's square aware a couple notions, The Customer Type selection read when it hits the Order screen would behave as follows:

Customer #1 retail = rate #1 retail applied
Customer #2 fleet = rate #2 fleet applied

Now if you want to create a job with a different "rate" in the current scenario, it's just a matter of skipping past hours, entering the price in charged Hours and letting the system back-calculate the hours (how your price relates to your default rate)

Example - Shop rate $90 per hour -> enter 1.0 in Charged Hours -> $90 price; want $100 for this one? Enter $100 in Labor Total and press Tab key -> Charged Hours changes to 1.11 hrs. [NOTE: invisible if using an INV w/o hours template]

I'm sure other shops will chime in as to how they look at it.

Canned jobs are typically used for a service that is standardized and every customer gets the same parts and labor every time. You can however check the box non-standard labor rate to over ride the canned price, but you still have to do that to each labor item you want to change.

Agreed. Most jobs would be defined as a single dollar amount. That's the idea of canned jobs. Additionally, if you have a customer or vehicle that has a labor rate other than the default, the program will create a pop-up asking you to use the default or the customer rate. Your choice there determines the charge.

The labor rates in Mitchell are geared towards customer or vehicle specific changes, not degree of difficulty as most users apply them.

I would also agree it would be beneficial to have the labor rates available during the creation stage of canned jobs, as most users apply labor rates by difficulty. To take that one step further, those rates should also be available during the creation of symptoms. Most symptoms require diagnosis of some sort, which would fall under the diagnostic rate, not the default.

While I'm on the proverbial soapbox, when that aforementioned pop-up arrives, users have no idea what rate the customer has so they cannot fully understand what will occur with the choices at hand. As some users may create rates that may be less than the default, this could cause a loss of revenue. It would make sense to me to have a preview of what each choice does to the canned job. That allows us to make the right choice.

Again, all of this revolves around how labor rates were designed versus how they get used in the field.

Thanks Ric, the By-The-Job container we've been discussing could be more flexible on labor rates applied. Your tip on displaying the rates in that pop-up dialog box sounds good, will pass that one along.