5 Must-Have Features To Look For in Technician Scheduling Software

For your auto shop to remain profitable and competitive, you’ll need to complete tasks as efficiently as possible. With that in mind, hiring hard-working, reliable technicians and creating well-thought-out work schedules for them is crucial. 

Ideally, your technician scheduling software goes far beyond letting you set work hours for your mechanics. Instead, your system of choice should include additional features to enhance your approach to worker scheduling. Here are the top five technician scheduling software features your shop needs to prioritize.

1. Mobile Functionality

The era of limiting programs to physical CD-ROMs is long in the past. These days, just about any software you can find is available in the form of digital downloads or cloud portals - and that certainly goes for technician scheduling software. 

Following this line of reasoning, your scheduling software shouldn’t be chained to a desktop workstation. In the modern age, business programs (especially those designed for busy environments like auto shops) should offer full mobile functionality. That way, your mechanics can log updates from their tablets and phones - all but eliminating their need to walk back and forth to a stationary computer.

2. Time Clock

Any technician scheduling software worth its salt will offer time clock, scheduling, and invoicing features. But the best programs in this niche will combine these features, maximizing efficiency and functionality without any extra effort on your part.

When using a well-designed time clock feature, your techs will only have to focus on two things: clocking in and clocking out. Between those two points, they’ll be able to pay attention to their jobs without manually logging anything else. Even so, you’ll still get all kinds of data to analyze at the end of the day.

That’s possible because modern-day time clocks can automatically capture time events in the background. On top of that, you’ll be able to convert billable hours to invoice forms with ease.

3. Tech Hours/Efficiency Tracking

At a bare minimum, technician scheduling software should allow you to track labor hours on a per-job basis. Still, efficiency tracking can (and should) take much more than raw labor hours into account. With the right software, you’ll be able to take a broader look at what your techs do in a day than ever before.

Tasks like training, dispatching, and estimating are all crucial to the success of your auto shop, but they aren’t directly measurable on repair orders. Because of that, it can be challenging to measure how efficiently your workers handle these jobs - unless your scheduling software is designed to measure them, too.

While it’s nice for your mechanics to be able to help out with non-billable tasks as needed, that shouldn’t take precedence over their actual jobs. By keeping an eye on areas where your techs have had to pick up the slack, you’ll be able to optimize your shop’s staffing strategy.

4. Labor Inventory Management

When you’re running an independent auto shop, technician efficiency is everything - and careful scheduling can help you maximize this. Unfortunately, traditional labor inventory management methods make it all but impossible to adjust tech schedules on the fly.

Real-time labor inventory management tools can allow you to reassign techs based on where they’re actually needed - not where you thought they’d need to be hours beforehand. By considering factors like job completions, additional work approvals, and part arrivals, you’ll avoid wasting your qualified employees’ time while helping them stay as efficient as possible.

5. Analytics

By its very nature, your technician scheduling software will deal with all kinds of data daily. Because of that, your program of choice should make it easy for you to analyze and act on these data points.

With full-fledged analytics features, your shop will be able to:

• Better understand its own processes 
• Recognize inefficiencies
• Improve on any weaknesses
• Analyze profitability metrics (profitability per technician, etc.)
• Recognize its most efficient technicians

Streamline Technician Efficiency 

As you can see, there’s much more to the process of technician scheduling than setting a time for your techs to show up. With the right technician scheduling software, you can keep your garage running smoothly day in and day out while constantly giving your qualified mechanics something to do.

AutoVitals’ technician scheduling software boasts all the features listed in this article and more. To start bringing your technician efficiency to the next level, take the first step by scheduling a demo today!