Setting up your shop

What this does

Onboarding gets you to a working dashboard. This checklist gets you to a shop that can take a car in, bill it, and post the sale to the books correctly. Do it in order; the last step is the one that bites people.

Before you start

You need the Owner or General Manager role. The accounting step needs whoever will keep the books to be in the room, or at least to have agreed on account numbers.

Steps

1. Shop Profile and rates

Settings → Shop Profile. Confirm the address, phone, email, and website that print on customer documents. On the same page:

• Default Labor Rate ($/hr), Parts Markup (%), Shop Supplies (% of labor), and Tax Rate (%) — the four numbers from onboarding, editable here from now on.
• Order prefix, Next order number, and Invoice Prefix — how work orders and invoices are numbered. Set these before your first real job; changing numbering later confuses customers and bookkeepers alike.
• Terminology — the singular and plural labels for Asset, Work Order, Bay, and Technician, plus the VIN and mileage labels. Change these if the shop-type defaults aren't quite right.

2. Bays

Settings → Shop Profile, the Shop Bays card. Add each physical bay or bench. Work orders are assigned to a bay, and the Shop Floor board is laid out by bay, so name them the way your technicians talk about them.

3. Canned Jobs

Settings → Canned Jobs. Review the services onboarding loaded. Fix labor hours and part lines so they match how you actually do the job. A good canned-jobs list is the single biggest speed-up at the counter.

4. Team

Settings → Team. Add everyone who will log in — Invite emails them a link to join, or Add Member creates the account directly — and give each a role. Roles decide what a person can see and do; see Roles and permissions before choosing. Technicians who don't log in but need to appear on work orders are added under Settings → Technicians instead.

5. Accounting settings — required before you invoice

Accounting → Chart of Accounts. On a new shop this is empty. Run the seed action to load the default chart (about 75 accounts, including 1100 Accounts Receivable and the 4000-series revenue accounts). Accounts are also created on demand as transactions post, but seed the defaults so the ledger is ready before the first invoice.

Accounting → Settings. Set two accounts:

• Accounts Receivable → 1100. An invoice will refuse to post without this.
• Default revenue account → a 4000-series account. Used for any line that has no revenue account of its own.

On the same page, two behaviours are on by default for new shops and are worth understanding before you change them. Undeposited first means every recorded payment lands in Undeposited Funds until you post a deposit that matches your bank; turn it off only if you want payments to hit the bank account directly. Reporting basis defaults to cash, which shows Profit & Loss and Sales Detail on a cash view once a period's invoices are all posted.

If you are bringing in invoice history from another system and have no ledger yet, use AR onboarding on this page. It posts one opening receivables balance and turns on the nightly tie-out that checks the ledger against open invoices. Do not run it on a shop that is already posting receivables.

Common problems

"Cannot post invoice: no AR account configured." Step 5 wasn't done. Set Accounts Receivable under Accounting → Settings and re-post the invoice.

The chart of accounts is empty and there's no seed button. The seed action only shows on a shop with zero accounts. If accounts already exist (created on demand), add the missing ones by hand or ask support.

Payments are recorded but the bank account balance in the app doesn't move. That's Undeposited first doing its job. Post a deposit under Accounting → Money In → Deposits and the bank balance updates.