A week of bench work, and a queue for what has no day yet.

Every time the counter says 'we'll have it Thursday', they are scheduling bench time whether they know it or not. When nobody can see what is already promised for Thursday, the answer is a guess, and in May the guesses stack up until a Saturday has twelve hours of work for two mechanics.

Scheduling in Service starts with the simplest useful thing: every visit on a day, in one list, where the counter and the bench can both see it. Before the counter promises Thursday, they can look at Thursday and count what is already on it. That is not automatic capacity, but it is a lot better than a whiteboard nobody updated since lunch.

Every visit on the schedule belongs to a job, and every job has its lines and its checklist. So the schedule is not a separate calendar to keep in step with the work. Booking a visit onto Thursday is the same record the mechanic opens on Thursday morning.

The week view lists visits under each day, with the job, the site and the person assigned. Step back or forward a week with previous and next. A mechanic can switch on the just-mine filter and see only their own work, which is what most people want at eight in the morning.

Visits without a day wait in the unscheduled queue. That is where a bike waiting on a fork seal kit belongs, or a frame that needs a warranty decision before anyone touches it. When the part arrives, you book the visit onto a day from the queue. When an approved quote converts into a job, you can give its visits dates at the same time, so routine work goes straight onto the week.

Changing the plan is done with two plain controls on each visit: one to reassign it to another person and one to move it to another day. There is no drag and drop. That was a deliberate choice for a first version, because a select box works the same on a phone at the bench as on the counter computer.

Scheduling today is day-level. Visits have a day, not a start time, and the week view is a list per day rather than a grid of hours. There are no columns per mechanic, so you see the whole shop's day and filter to one person rather than seeing everyone side by side.

There is no capacity limit. Service will let you book ten overhauls onto Saturday if you tell it to. Working out how many hours are left for each mechanic, and stopping a day from filling when it is full, is on the roadmap, and it is the same capacity that online booking will read from once riders can pick their own drop-off slot.

Repeating work is typed in rather than generated. If a fleet customer has a safety check every quarter, you give the visits their dates one per line. Recurrence rules, a printable day sheet per mechanic, a calendar feed and push notifications when someone's day changes are all part of the plan.

Most of the pain of a busy season comes from two things: work nobody gave a day to, and work nobody gave a name to. The unscheduled queue fixes the first, because a bike cannot quietly fall off the plan while it sits in a list waiting to be booked. The assignee on every visit fixes the second.

The rest is judgment you already have. A service manager who can see Thursday's visits in one list can tell whether one more overhaul fits. When capacity arrives, it will do that sum for you. Until then, the week view gives you the numbers to do it yourself.