Service orders
The service centre module is the only place in the system that works with somebody else's property. Stock keeps your goods, production makes your products; here the customer brings in their own drill. You cannot sell it, you cannot write it off — you have to repair it and give it back. That is why the module has its own service locations: for equipment where not losing it matters more than accounting for it.
The second trait: a repair lives longer than a sale and has a state of its own. The customer asks not "where are my goods" but "what stage is the repair at", and the service order answers that — one record per device. The cost of the repair is carried by a different document, the worksheet. The order says WHAT is wrong with the device; the worksheet says WHAT WAS DONE and what it costs; the payment, though, is taken in the order itself.
Video walkthrough: Service orders in ERPJS step by step — a repair from intake to handover.
The route: from intake to handover
Intake: service order
├── service item (device model) + service location
└── status → automatic tasks for staff + SMS to the customer
↓
Diagnosis · approval · repair
↓
Worksheet → spare parts off stock + postings + amount into the order
↓
Handover and payment or Refusal + failure cause
↓
Reports: order status · paid orders · device history
- Service order — the intake: whose device, which model, which brand, which service location it went to, which department took it in.
- Statuses drive the repair, and every transition works on its own: following the Actions Setting (it lives in the CRM module), a status change sets a task for the staff listed for that status, and the department's engineers are added as participants of the responsible person's task. The SMS texts inform the customer on three statuses: "On diagnostics", "Ready" and "Refusal". The result of a phone call is recorded with an alert status — by hand.
- Worksheet — the job card: the work done and the parts used. Posting it issues the parts from stock, creates the postings (unless the "Worksheets" box is cleared in the "Records from Subsystems" setting) and adds the amount to the order; a warranty worksheet adds zero.
- The money is taken with the "Pay" button in the order — by one of the payment methods set for the department (their accounts live in payment methods). How much has been paid and how much is left is shown in the order itself; the list of its payments is in the Payments report.
- A repair may not happen — then the order goes to "Refusal" with a failure cause: without a cause that status will not save. There is no ready-made report by cause — how many customers walked away over price and how many devices turned out to be working is summed up from an export of the orders.
What is worth understanding
The order carries the state and the payment, the worksheet carries the charge. That is the module's main division. Until the worksheet is posted, the repair is done in words only: the parts are still in stock, the books are empty and the order's total does not grow. "Why is revenue lower than the repairs we completed" almost always means unposted worksheets.
The service items reference fills itself. Service Items are models of customer equipment (code, name, brand), and there is no need to enter them in advance: an order with a new code, name and brand creates the model's card itself when saved. Only the brand is needed beforehand — it is picked from brands. You can accept for repair something you have never sold.
Required fields beat asking people to "fill it in carefully". The required fields setting makes an omission technically impossible — the desk simply will not save an order without, say, the customer's complaint or the device's appearance (the setting does not cover the phone number or the serial).
The department is frozen by payment. A department is the point where the device was taken in and the money is collected; without it the order will not create a worksheet with "Create work table" and will not open the payment, and once a payment is recorded the department can no longer be changed.
Service is closely fused with CRM. The automatic tasks a status change creates are the same tasks you see on the process board (if the board has a column for their type). The module has no scheduler of its own — it uses the shared one.
Where to start in a new database
- Departments and service locations — where devices are taken in and where they physically sit.
- Engineers — who joins the responsible person's task on their department's orders.
- Service Order Required Fields and Service Currency — the rules of intake and money.
- Text SMS and Actions Setting (CRM module) — so that statuses notify the customer and hand out work by themselves.
- Failure causes, alert statuses, brands — short references that later rescue your reporting.
Common tasks
| You need | Where to go |
|---|---|
| take a device in for repair | Service order |
| record work and spare parts | Worksheet |
| answer "what is happening with my repair" | SO Status Report |
| see the whole workshop | Balance For Manager |
| gather the base for the technicians' commission (the report does not compute the percentage) | Paid Orders Report |
| see worksheet amounts for a period (unposted ones included) | Worksheets Report |
| check whether this device has been here before | Service Item History Report |
| count the customers' devices in the workshop | Service Item Status Report |
| see the payments on an order | Payments |
| see everything about a customer at once | Customer Information Report · Customer Debt Report |
| print a label for a device taken in ("Printing Labels" in the order) | Labels Print Setting |
| load data in bulk | Xlsx Import |
Everything in the module
Documents: Service Orders · Worksheets
References: Service Items · Items · Contacts · Phones Settings (a "number → owner" book; sales orders fill and read it, service orders do not) · Departments · Service Locations · Brands · Failure Causes · Alert Status · Projects
Settings: Service Order Required Fields · Engineers · Text SMS · Payment Methods · Service Currency · Labels Print Setting
Reports: SO Status Report · Balance For Manager · Worksheets Report · Paid Orders Report · Service Item History Report · Service Item Status Report · Payments · Customer Information Report · Customer Debt Report · Project Information Report
Maintenance: Xlsx Import · Xlsx Export