Job Board Rollout Checklist
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A step-by-step checklist for setting up or replacing an auto repair job board, from choosing lanes and assigning card owners to the first month of huddles, customer texts, and measurements.

[ ] Pick one place the board lives, whether a wall screen, a tablet at the desk, or a whiteboard, that both the advisor and the techs can see without walking.
[ ] Write down every status you use today, on paper or in your head, before you look at what any software offers.
[ ] Rewrite each status so it answers what the car is waiting on right now, and retire vague ones like In Progress.
[ ] Cap the first version at the core lanes: Checked In, Diagnosing, Waiting on Approval, Waiting on Parts, In Bay, Quality Check, Ready for Pickup, and Picked Up.
[ ] Add Waiting on Sublet only if you regularly send work to a machine shop, glass installer, or alignment shop.
[ ] Assign a role, not a person, to every card move, using the Job Board Status and Ownership Worksheet, so the rule survives a day off.
[ ] Name who moves cars out of Waiting on Parts the moment parts are checked in, since this is the lane that stalls most quietly.
[ ] Set a sitting-time limit for each waiting lane so a car that sits past it gets flagged at the afternoon check instead of discovered at closing.
[ ] Decide which status changes send a customer text, and start with only three: checked in, approval needed, and ready for pickup.
[ ] Write the approval text template with the findings in plain words, a price for each item, and one clear question the customer can answer with a single word.
[ ] Write the ready text template with the total, pickup hours, and how to pay, and make sure it never promises a time the shop cannot keep.
[ ] Agree on a bundling rule for approvals: one message with all the findings from the inspection, not a text for every small item.
[ ] Make sure every approval by text is attached to the job, not left in someone's personal phone, so there is a timestamped record at pickup.
[ ] Load every car currently in the building onto the board on day one, including the ones sitting in the back lot.
[ ] Post a printed copy of the lane definitions and the owner list next to the board and next to the front desk.
[ ] Put a five-minute morning huddle in front of the board on the calendar, plus a mid-afternoon stall check of the waiting lanes.
[ ] Make the tech update take a few seconds at most, whether that is a tap on a bay tablet or a shout to the advisor who moves the card.
[ ] Run the old system, the paper stack or the whiteboard, in parallel for the first week, then stop it on a date everyone knows.
[ ] Pick one board owner for the first month with the authority to nag, and enforce card moves at every handoff until nobody needs reminding.
[ ] Choose the two numbers you will watch first: cycle time from Checked In to Ready for Pickup, and hours spent in the waiting lanes.
[ ] Review work in progress weekly, and if more cars are in the building than the bays can move, slow drop-offs until the board clears; the Auto Repair Shop Bay Capacity Planner helps set that ceiling.
[ ] After two weeks, count the status calls the desk still takes and compare them with the estimate you made before the rollout.
[ ] Ask a few customers what they thought of the texts, then adjust wording and frequency before adding any new notifications.
[ ] At the end of month one, merge lanes that stay empty and split any lane where cars pile up for two different reasons.