I feel your pain. Unlike the other migrations from 5.9 to present, the scheduler upgrade did a major about-face in look and feel. That caught many of us off-guard. The feel was one of a doctors office, where appointments arrive and leave in convenient little blocks. Shops don't operate that way.careautomotive wrote:Well when you don't have customer data it's a pain..... I am not going to create a new customer over the phone. So "DAVE" calls fine i will enter it. what happens when a different dave calls without any data either...
The old schedule i could enter " . " (or what ever i want) as a name a quick note O/C (oil change) and done. NO TIME, DATE etc needed.. So how does this new schedule save me time?
With that said, much effort has been leveraged to mold this new format into the perfect tool to maximize efficiency. Is it ready for prime time? Not quite yet IMO but it's getting close.
In the 90's, we used a paper schedule. When I came on with M1, I kept my paper schedule because I was sure that the mediocre schedule in 5.7 was not up to the task. I was wrong. In a few months we ditched the paper.
When I first beta-tested the new scheduler, I swore I was going to need to go back to paper. It wasn't the upgrade I anticipated. I was wrong again. It was a difficult at first, but with each tweak it got easier and easier. New views allowed us more versatility.
Regarding your issue with not wanting to create a customer for new appointments, I get that. Here at my shop we create a new customer, but not everyone wants to do that. I suggest you create a customer placeholder for this purpose. A fake customer in your database called whatever you want. Use this 'customer' to hold a place in your schedule. You could even start the last name with a character like * or & so it's easier to find by simply typing that character. Following that practice you can create a time slot in seconds. Just remember you'll have to change that customer to a real value if they show and that's more work. If you have more no shows than shows, then this process is more efficient. ( I hope that isn't true) If more people show up than not, then it's more efficient to create the customer once at the onset. (As an aside, we REQUIRE name and number for an appointment. This creates a sense of importance to people and leads to fewer no-shows)
As a business I need to sell what my customers want. Sometimes it's hard to know exactly what that is because I'm never really in their shoes. I've never paid for automotive service in my life. I *think* I know, but sometimes I'm off the target a bit. I think we're in a similar situation here. M1 has always worked in my best interest and I have confidence in their abilities to hit that target.