Eleven status stages. Most workshop job cards use three — received, in progress, delivered — and the space between "in progress" and "delivered" is where customer relationships go to die.
A customer who dropped off a vehicle at 9am on a Tuesday and hasn't received a call by 4pm isn't thinking about your alignment bay backlog or the parts supplier who didn't deliver until noon. They're thinking about whether to ever come back. The Visco GMS template builds a workflow where every vehicle has a named stage at every moment, and the customer contact record is attached to that stage directly, not written in a separate log that nobody checks.
When the Intake Queue Loses the Thread
A busy workshop running eight to twelve vehicles simultaneously is a logistics problem as much as a technical one. A service advisor taking three customer calls while a tech is asking about parts availability while a car on the road test comes back with a new noise — the information management collapses exactly at the moment you need it most.
The eleven-stage pipeline here — Inspection, Quotation, Approval, Parts, Starting, Work In Progress, Alignment, Road Test, Washing, Ready, Delivered — isn't bureaucracy. It's a query filter. A sort on Status showing every vehicle currently at "04 Parts" tells the service advisor which jobs are blocked pending parts arrival without asking the workshop floor. Every vehicle at "08 Road Test" is near the end. Every vehicle at "10 Ready" has been sitting waiting for customer collection, and the Delivery datetime field tells you exactly how long.
The Garage field — Main, Branch, Painting — adds the physical dimension that multi-bay operations need. A filter combining Garage = Painting with Status = 06 Work In Progress shows every vehicle currently in the paint bay. You don't need to walk across the lot.
The Record That Travels With the Vehicle
The VIN, plate number, model, manufacturing year, and mileage fields establish the vehicle's identity independently of the customer record. VIN is particularly important: it's the one identifier that can't be transcribed incorrectly or confused with another vehicle from the same owner. When a customer returns with the same vehicle six months later, the historical record is searchable by VIN regardless of whether they've changed phone numbers or registered under a slightly different name.
Mileage at intake is a field that mechanics treat as an admin formality and lawyers treat as critical documentation. An odometer reading recorded at reception, paired with the Receive datetime field, establishes a clear record of the vehicle's condition and usage at the moment of handover. When a customer later claims their car was driven during the repair period, that entry either confirms or refutes the claim.
The Meter image field captures the odometer photograph at intake — standard practice in any workshop that's been through a dispute about mileage. The Images field handles exterior condition documentation. The Image field at the bottom of the record handles technical photography: fault evidence, inspection findings, damage pre-repair. Three separate image fields because they serve three separate purposes and shouldn't be mixed into a single gallery.
Voice, Text, and the Gap Between What Customers Say and What They Mean
The Customer Voice field — text and audio — captures the customer's stated complaint at intake. Both formats exist for a reason. The text field is for what gets written down after translation into technical language. The audio field captures what the customer actually said, in their words, before any interpretation.
A customer who says "it makes a clicking sound when I turn left at low speed" is describing CV joint wear. A customer who says "there's a vibration in the steering above 80 km/h" is describing wheel balance or wheel bearing. But a customer who says "it feels like the back end is loose when I brake hard" is describing something that could be a rear suspension geometry issue, worn bushes, a brake bias problem, or a combination — and the audio recording of that specific description can save thirty minutes of diagnostic time when the technician reviews it before the vehicle even goes on the lift.
The Suspension field using a fault tree structure is where the technical inspection outcome is documented. Fault tree recording captures the hierarchical relationship between symptoms, subsystems, and confirmed faults in a way that free-text comments never do — and the data is queryable across the vehicle fleet.
When the road test at stage 08 surfaces a noise the customer didn't report on intake — a rattle from the nearside rear that only appears at operating temperature — the Comments and audio Comment fields are where that goes, timestamped against the road test stage, before the vehicle moves to Washing and then Ready.