Tips & Tricks - Take Advantage of the AutoFluent® Scheduler

An organized shop is a productive shop. With the AutoFluent® Scheduler, you can schedule appointments for existing workorders, assign jobs to your mechanics, and even link to a google calendar where you have the option to share your appointments with your mechanics and customers.

All of the Scheduler settings are in the Employees Setup Window. The Scheduler will use a start time and end time according to the Store Hours that you set in the Timeclock Setup tab. The rest of your settings will be set in the Scheduler Setup tab. Since you can group appointments and workorders on the Scheduler by Mechanics, Labor Departments, and Bays, you will want to make sure that these get setup correctly. 

  • As long as your Mechanics have the “Employee is a Mechanic” permission, they will show up in your Scheduler when you group by mechanic. You will even see all appointments and workorders that are not assigned to a mechanic in the None section. 

  • You can set up to 6 Labor Departments. You can change the names, set a default number of hours (in 30 minute increments), and sort how the labor departments will show on the Scheduler. When scheduling an appointment you can assign labor departments, but when an appointment is turned into a Workorder the labor department assigned to the labor items that are on the workorder will determine where it shows up. Make sure to assign your labor departments to every labor item in your Inventory so you can accurately group by the Labor Department. 

  • To setup bays, input how many bays you have. They will show in the Scheduler when you Group By Bay, including all appointments not assigned to a bay.

Syncing your AutoFluent® Scheduler with Google Calendar is a simple and easy solution for sharing appointment times and information with your customers and employees. To activate the Google Calendar Sync check the box for Sync appointments with Google Calendar then Save Changes. Then inside the AutoFluent® Scheduler, right-click and select Google Calendar Sync. This will open a browser window for you to log into the Google account that you want to have synced.

Any Calendars for employees that have been shared with your Google Calendar will be available and you can associate them with specific Mechanics or Bays from the Scheduler so Google Calendar will automatically assign the correct appointments to them. Within Google Calendar you can also add the customer as a Guest on the appointment to provide them with reminders and updates on their appointment and vehicle.

When creating a new appointment you can select the sales rep, mechanic, customer, phone number, vehicle, and any labor departments. You can set the length of the appointment by the work performed or you can set a manual end time by unchecking that box. If a customer or vehicle does not already exist in your database you can click the new buttons for each.There are multiple ways to create appointments in AutoFluent® . 

  • Scheduling appointments is as easy as double-clicking or right-clicking any time slot on any day of the calendar. 

  • You can schedule an appointment for any existing workorders from the Status button in the Sales entry window.

  • You’re also able to schedule from within the workorder window by clicking the Schedule button on the bottom of the window.

You can connect with AutoFluent® Support with any questions about the setup and usage for your AutoFluent® Scheduler.


Adam Irby