Take a tire shop with two fitting bays, three fitters and one person at the front desk. In October and April the phone rings all day. Bookings go into a paper diary that one person opens one day and someone else the next. Tires that customers store over the season are in a notebook: name, plate, “shelf 4”. When the customer arrives, a fitter searches every shelf because somebody moved a row during the season. Some customers forget their slot, others get booked twice.
This is an illustrative example that many tire shops will recognise. Below is how you run such a shop in changeover season with eNalog: bookings with reminders, storage with numbers and labels, and warnings for tires that are no longer fit for the road.
What slowed the season down
- ✓Bookings lived in a diary, so one person always had to stay by the phone.
- ✓Customers forgot their appointments and free slots went unused.
- ✓The storage notebook did not say exactly where a set was or what condition it was in at drop-off.
- ✓Nobody warned customers that their stored winter tires had almost no tread left.
Bookings: online appointments and SMS reminders
In Company settings → Reservations the administrator sets opening hours and the length of a slot, then puts the public booking link on the website or sends it to customers. Customers book on their own, even in the evening when the shop is closed. New requests appear in Work → Reservations, where the front desk confirms or declines them, and the customer gets an e-mail either way.
Customers who call are not left out. The person at the desk, or a fitter on the workshop tablet, clicks New booking and picks the day, a free time (taken times are orange), the length and the customer. Such a booking is confirmed straight away. On the left is a monthly calendar where busier days are darker, so you can see at a glance where there is still room.
A customer with a confirmed booking gets two text messages: one the afternoon before and one on the morning of the appointment. Both are on by default and each uses one SMS from the plan. When the customer arrives, the fitter clicks the booking and a work order opens with the customer, vehicle and service already filled in.
Taking tires into storage
When a customer leaves a set with you, the fitter records it in Clients → Tire hotel:
- 1Clicks Store tires and selects the customer and vehicle.
- 2Chooses the season (summer, winter or all-season) and enters size, brand, model and DOT.
- 3Marks whether the tires are on rims and enters the measured tread depth for each wheel.
- 4Enters the location, for example shelf A3, and saves. The set gets a storage number such as H-0012.
- 5Clicks Label and prints four labels with the number, season, location, customer, vehicle and a QR code.
You can label the shelves too: Place labels prints labels for the places in your storage. When a fitter scans the QR code on a shelf with a phone, they see every set stored there. The notebook is gone, and a set can be found by storage number, plate, phone, size or brand.
A swap in a few clicks
When the customer comes in for the seasonal change, the fitter clicks Swap on their stored set. Customer, vehicle and location are already filled in and the season is set to the opposite one. The fitter only enters the tires taken off the car and their tread, then clicks Do the swap. The stored set is marked as handed out, while the removed set gets a new number and new labels. If the customer only collects the set, the fitter clicks Hand out.
On an ordinary service, too, the vehicle’s work order shows which set you are storing and where. So you can mention during an oil change that it is time for winter tires.
Warnings and seasonal reminders
The tire hotel flags sets with low tread, tread below the legal minimum, or tires that are six years old or more according to their DOT code. The fitter tells the customer during the swap, and the front desk can prepare a quote for new tires in advance.
At the bottom of the tire hotel page, the administrator or office turns on Seasonal reminders and sets a date for spring and one for autumn. On that day, customers who store tires for the coming season with you get a message asking them to book a change. If online booking is on, the message has a button to book a slot, so customers spread themselves out instead of all calling in the same week.
The tire hotel, reservations and SMS messages are part of the Pro and Premium plans. When the swap is done, the fitter closes the work order and the invoice is issued straight from it as a fiscally compliant invoice.
What changed
Bookings are in one place and visible to everyone, including on the workshop tablet. Customers get a reminder, so fewer slots stay empty. Every set has its own number, label and location, so a fitter finds it without searching every shelf. The condition of the tires is recorded at drop-off, and the app itself shows who should be offered new ones.