Streamlining Your Work Order Workflow: AutoFluent Desktop

This month we are focusing on what people using AutoFluent® do the most: creating and editing Work Orders. Although it’s something you may already be comfortable with, here are some ideas on streamlining your workflow.

Finding your Customer

A customer walks into your shop. You begin in the Sales Entry window. There are several ways to find the customer:

  • Hit the tab key 3 times to move to the yellow box in the Phone column, and enter the phone number, entering digits only. Then click the magnifying glass icon on the right side of the box. This will give you a list of all the customers with that phone number as any of their 4 phone numbers. If you entered a 7-digit number, it will try adding the 3 area codes set up in the address tab of your System Settings. If no customer exists, and you have the Whitepages service, a window will pop up, showing you what Whitepages has found for that person.

  • Enter the customer’s name or company name in the yellow search boxes. An advantage of this is that if the customer is not found, you can click the ‘New’ button, and a new Workorder will be created with the name you just entered. Note that there is a setting to have the company name be in the first column of the customer list, if most of your customers have company names. This is in the ‘Defaults - Misc’ tab of System Settings.

  • If you have the license plate handy, you can move the cursor to the Search button in the bottom left and select License Plates. Then you can enter the plate, and hit Select to select the vehicle and its owner.

Once a customer has been selected through any of these methods, clicking the New button at the top will create a Work Order for the selected customer. If no customer has been found, the New button will create a new Work Order for a new customer.

Entering Work Order Lines

Once the cursor is in the body of the Work Order (in the grid), there are some keyboard shortcuts to speed up your entry:

  • You can enter the catalog number, and use the tab key to move to the description, quantity, etc., to edit them. Hitting Enter will save the line and move you to the next one.

  • Hit the F2 function key to bring up the Search window. Here also you can enter the Size/Item, use the Tab key to move to other yellow boxes, use the down and up arrow keys to move to different lines, and use the Enter key to select the item and return to the Work Order.

  • If the cursor is on a line with an Outside Part, Tire or Labor item, hitting the F3 key is the same as clicking the ‘P’, ‘T’ or ‘L’ button on the line.

 Customizing the Work Order Grid

The Work Order Grid has many columns, but several of them can be hidden, to help you view only the information that is pertinent to you. There are two ways of customizing the Work Order’s columns:

  • Click the Toggle Columns button at the bottom of the Work Order. This brings up a list of the optional columns which can be turned on and off. Note that certain columns (like Cost) will be hidden depending on your rights and system settings. 

  • This list of columns also shows how some of the columns can be toggled on and off on the fly. For example, if you click the word Price at the top of the Work Order Grid, the Cost column will appear or disappear. The Catalog header toggles the Availability column, and the Qty header toggles the Hours column. See the list of columns for other togglable columns.

There are multiple ways of doing things in Work Orders, and the methods shown aren’t necessarily the only correct way of doing things, but we suggest that you give them a try. Time saved by optimizing your most common tasks is time you can spend to better serve your customers.


Adam Irby