Setting Up a Service Center
Standing this module up in a fresh database is less about the number of screens and more about the order you touch them in, and about three or four decisions that are cheap to make now and painful to change later.
There is also one trap that catches almost every new installation, and it is not where you would look for it: the car-tracking half of the module is switched off out of the box, and switching it on takes three separate actions in three different places. That is covered below under Turning Car Tracking On — read it before you promise a go-live date for the showroom.
This page walks the setup as Al-Sahra Motors would actually do it: the workshop first, the dealership second, the extras last.
Required licence
Nothing in this module exists without a licence. Before you start, confirm which of the six codes you actually hold — srvcenter for the workshop, srvcenter-subitems for the cars, srvcenter-insurance-and-installments, srvcenter-rental-assets, srvcenter-mobile-delivery, srvcenter-service-queues. If a menu folder described here is missing, it is a licence question, not a permissions question. See Service Center for what each code covers.
Step Zero — Open the Settings Screen and Save It Once
Do this before anything else, even if you change nothing.
Several parts of the module read the Service Center settings record without checking whether it exists — closing a job order and recalculating prices are two of them. On a database where nobody has ever saved that screen there is no record to read, and those operations fail with an unhelpful technical error rather than a message telling you what is missing.
So: open Service Center → Settings, open the module settings screen, and save it. The defaults are sensible — 80 % of capacity to appointments, closing blocked while tasks are unfinished, busy technicians hidden — and you can revisit them at leisure. What matters is that the record exists.
(Yes, that folder really does display with a leading space, so it looks slightly indented. That is a label defect, not a different folder.)
Decisions to Settle Before You Type
Four questions. All four are answered on the settings screen, all four are read constantly, and all four are annoying to reverse once documents exist. The full option list is in Service Center Settings; these are the ones with consequences.
Where service prices come from
Service Price Strategy decides whether a task's hourly rate and a service's total price are taken from the ordinary price columns or from the manufacturer's recommended price columns. It is a single installation-wide switch, and it applies at the moment a price is pulled onto a document. Change it later and existing documents keep the prices they were given, while new ones use the other column — which is exactly the kind of inconsistency that makes a price list look broken. Decide once.
How rentals are priced
Pricing Method — By Hour or By Day — is likewise one setting for the whole installation, not per asset and not per booking. It changes both the arithmetic and the screen layout of every rental document.
Prefer By Hour
The By Day path does not recalculate the day count from the booking dates: the count is computed once and then left alone, so a user who changes the period after typing the count is left with a total that does not match the dates. If your business genuinely bills by the day, price a day as a block of hours and stay on By Hour. All the rental examples in this documentation are By Hour for that reason. See Renting Out Assets.
One work centre, or several
A work centre is the shop: its warehouse, its fallback labour rate, its reception window, its bay count and hours per bay. Al-Sahra has two — a mechanical hall and a body shop — which is the natural modelling choice.
Publish daily capacity for one work centre at a time
The loading table, which is how you publish a day's capacity split, does not scope its effects to the work centre named on it. Commit a loading table for the body shop and it will overwrite the day capacity that the mechanical hall was relying on, and the appointment check will then be testing bookings against the wrong shop's hours.
Until this is fixed, treat published day capacity as an installation-wide figure: either run capacity for a single work centre, or accept that the appointment check is indicative. Multiple work centres for costing, routing and reporting are fine — it is only the day-capacity numbers that cannot be trusted across more than one.
Whether an item carries individually tracked cars
This one belongs to the dealership half and is the least reversible thing in the module: an item's Has Sub Item switch cannot be changed once the item has transactions. Decide before you buy the first car whether a given model is ordinary stock or an individually tracked vehicle. See the next section.
Part One — The Workshop, In Order
1. The shop
Create a work centre for each hall. Give it the warehouse its parts come out of, an hourly labour rate to fall back on, the reception window customers can book into, and the bay count and hours per bay that add up to a day's total available hours. Al-Sahra's WC-MECH is five bays × eight hours = 40 hours a day at 120 an hour.
The resources grid — the machines in the hall — is worth filling for the record, but be clear about what it is: it is descriptive. Nothing schedules against it and nothing checks machine availability.
2. Brands, models and categories
Set up the three-level classification before the catalogue, because the catalogue's price tables key on it. Al-Sahra has one brand (NAWA), three models and one category. The useful part to get right is the model, since model is what drives the labour time, the hourly rate and the service interval on a task.
3. The catalogue: tasks, then services
A task is one repair step — an oil change, a brake pad replacement — with a standard duration, an hourly price, the parts it consumes and, where the job recurs, the kilometre interval that brings it round again. Build the tasks first.
Then bundle them into services, which are what you actually sell and price. A service can price line by line or carry one package price for the whole bundle; that choice is per service, and it is the one thing on that screen worth thinking about twice.
Give each task a per-model line carrying the labour time and rate for that model. It takes longer to set up, and it is what makes the figures the job order proposes agree with the figures a later recalculation produces.
The small classification files — accessories kits, visit types, operation classifications — can wait. They classify and nothing more.
4. Vehicles already on the road
If you are replacing an existing system, the workshop's vehicle files come across with their identity, plate, owner and current odometer. What does not come across automatically is what was last done to them and when, which is what the system needs in order to tell you what is due.
That is what the product task opening document is for: one per vehicle, listing the last date and odometer of each recurring task. Post those before go-live and the service-interval projections work from day one. Skip them and every vehicle looks as though it has never been serviced. See Odometer Readings and Service Intervals.
5. Document books and terms
Every document in the chain needs a book, and most need a توجيه (document term). The terms are where the real behaviour lives — which invoices the closing generates, what the gate pass demands before it releases a car, whether spare-parts documents generate stock movements. Start from Document Terms in Service Center and then Workshop Document Terms.
Two things to know before you fill them in. First, an accounting block on a term screen does not prove the document posts — several documents show account fields they never use. Second, where a term generates a stock document, the Generate Document tick is not the switch you think it is: on several documents it is ignored, and the only reliable way to stop generation is to leave the generation book and term blank.
6. Publish capacity, and start taking work
Post a loading table for the work centre and the date range, splitting the day's total available hours into appointments, carry-over, walk-ins and emergencies. Al-Sahra's split is 80 / 10 / 5 / 5, which puts 32 of the 40 hours into the appointment bucket.
Understand what that buys you: only the appointment bucket is enforced, and only from the second booking of a day onwards — the first reservation of any day is accepted whatever its size. The other three buckets are planning information.
From here the shop is open: service requests can be booked, and the job-order cycle runs.
Part Two — The Car Dealership
Turning Car Tracking On
Here is the trap. Individually tracked cars are not available on a new installation, and making them available is not one switch.
Three things must all be true, or car tracking does not work
- The Sub Items feature must be removed from the prevented-features list. Every configuration group ships with the sub-item feature (
الأصناف الفرعية/ Sub Items) on its prevented features list, which hides every car-related field on every screen. Until an administrator takes it off that list, users will not see the fields at all — and will report, quite reasonably, that the module is missing. - Each vehicle item needs its own status configuration. On the item that represents the model, tick Has Sub Item and attach a Car Status Configurations record. Both are required. Without the configuration, car creation fails with a message naming the item, and the lifecycle does nothing at all. Setting a Default Sub Item Configuration in the module settings does not cover this — see Service Center Settings.
- The chassis and engine columns must be added to the purchase screens. Out of the box, no car-purchase screen carries a chassis-number or engine-number column — not the purchase order, not the purchase invoice, not the proforma, not the purchase return. Since automatic car creation reads those columns off the line, the feature cannot work as shipped. Add them to the line grid through a screen modification before you rely on it.
Miss any one of the three and the result is not an error message; it is a screen that looks right and does nothing. This is the biggest first-day trap in the module.
Remember also that Has Sub Item locks once the item has transactions. Decide per model, and decide before the first purchase.
The vocabulary bridge
You will hit this within the hour, so learn it now: the record the menu calls Customer Car (السياره) is the same record that roughly forty configuration and document-term options call Sub Item (الصنف الفرعي). Same thing, two vocabularies. Documentation and option labels say sub item; the menu says customer car. See The Car Dealership in Nama.
The lifecycle you draw yourself
Nothing about a car's behaviour ships as a default. The car status configuration is where you state:
- the status a newly created car starts in, and the master group it lands in;
- which document moves a car to which status (the updater lines);
- which moves are legal (the movement lines);
- whether a line's quantity must be exactly one — worth switching on, because a hand-typed line with quantity 5 otherwise produces one car record for five cars;
- the filters the car picker offers.
Build the updater lines and the movement lines together and check they agree. They are not cross-validated, so an updater line can name a status that no movement row permits, and the first sign of it is a real document being refused mid-transaction.
Where cars are born
A car record is created automatically when you save any Car Purchases document — order, receipt, proforma, purchase invoice or purchase return — whose term has Create Sub Item From Line Information switched on.
Switch it on for exactly one document type in your chain
If two documents in the same chain both carry the flag and the later one is built from the earlier, the existing car is re-edited — its group, status and warehouse silently rewritten from the new line. If the later document's lines are typed fresh instead, a duplicate car record is created; nothing checks that a chassis number is unique.
And never switch it on for a return term: a purchase return or sales return with the flag on will mint brand-new car records.
Al-Sahra's choice — and the one this documentation assumes throughout — is the Car Purchase Invoice, one chassis per line. See The Car Purchase Invoice.
Which document moves the stock
The other setup decision with real money attached. Both the Car Receipt and the Car Purchase Invoice can generate a stock receipt, and neither can see the other's; configure both and the same chassis is taken into stock twice, at double the cost, with no error. The same defect exists on the way out, between the Car Sales Invoice and the Car Final Delivery.
The rule, both times: fill the generation book and term on exactly one of the two document terms, and leave them blank on the other. Al-Sahra generates stock from the purchase invoice on the way in and from the sales invoice on the way out; its receipt and final-delivery terms have empty generation books.
Then the rest of the chain
With those decisions made, set up books and terms for the sales chain — quotation, order, allocation, invoice, delivery — and read The Car Sales Cycle. If you are also selling insurance or financing, remember the licence dependency: insurance needs srvcenter-subitems as well as its own code, because the insurance company master file lives in the cars menu. Start at Selling Insurance with a Car and Finance Companies and Instalment Programmes.
Part Three — The Extras
Each of these is independent of everything above and can be set up whenever you need it.
Rental — create the classifications, then the rental assets with their service item, working hours and price tiers. An asset with an empty tier grid and no classification refuses every booking, so fill the tiers before you announce the service. Booking, Invoicing and Cancelling covers the documents.
Queues — build one queue configuration as a reusable rulebook (queue letters, numbering, who serves which queue, waiting-room banners), then a branch per reception hall with its day start time. Ticket numbering restarts at 1 each day at that time. On a multi-branch installation, verify the daily reset on each branch after any configuration change — it is not reliably applied to every branch at once.
Mobile delivery — configure the courier app's document books and the collection window, then read Delivery Documents. One rule from the start: one courier per delivery document.
A Short Checklist
If you want the setup as a list to work down:
- Save the Service Center settings screen once.
- Settle service price strategy and rental pricing method.
- Work centres, then brands and models, then tasks, then services.
- Product task opening documents for vehicles already on the road.
- Document books and terms — with generation configured on exactly one document per stock chain.
- Loading table for the current period, one work centre.
- For cars: remove the Sub Items feature from the prevented list, tick Has Sub Item and attach a status configuration to each vehicle item, and add the chassis and engine columns to the purchase screens.
- Build the status configuration's updater and movement lines together, and switch the creation flag on for exactly one document type.
- Extras last.