Motive Power controls work orders, workers, profitability, and handles customer contact. Motive Power views the basic unit of work as a job. Each work order is organized as a series of jobs. Each job has a job description, parts list, sublets needed (if any) and timeclock. Work orders show separate totals and profit margins for each job. Detailed information is kept for each customer and each vehicle or piece of equipment owned by that customer. Detailed reports break down parts usage, sales, and timeclock data. All payments, work orders, e-mails and license number changes are logged. Motive Power does not require you to perform any end of day or end of week activities. The system prompts you when reminders are due or a backup is overdue.

Work orders features:

• Smart Jobs
• Timekeeping
• Job Scoring
• E-mailing
• Voice Messages

Customer Management features:

• Customer Information
• Vehicles/Equipment
• Customer Contact
• Integration with QuickBooks

Customization options:

• Invoice Formatting
• Supplies Charges
• Sales Tax Setup
• Job Scoring Setup
• Drop Down Lists
• Job Titles
• Personnel
• Reminders
• Warning

Reporting abilities:

• Parts Needed
• Timeclock Details
• Sales Analysis
• Activity Logs
• Exports

Other daily operations:

• Cashbox details
• Data backup
• Sales and tech summaries
• Reminder print and e-mail
• Recover disk space

Utilities:

• GarageKeeper import
• Parts Catalog
• Combine engines

Motive Power has these unique work order features:

• Smart jobs - learn every job, part, and sublet ever done and makes them available for easy reuse. Any job that has been done will appear automatically the next time that same job needs to be done on that same vehicle or piece of equipment. Any job done is available as a starting point for any other job that needs to be done.
• Timekeeping - provides a built in time clock that allows for both real time capture and hand entry of time spent on a job by job basis. Reports help you to analyze worker productivity and gather information for use in calculating payroll.
• Job scoring - guarantees proper profit margins on each component of each job. You set your minimum acceptable margin for labor, for parts, and for sublets. Motive Power shows you anything that does not meet your profit requirements for each of these components for each job on the current work order. You can choose settings that prevent a work order from being finalized until it meets these margins.
• E-mailing - lets you send copies of estimates and work in progress to customers that have an e-mail address in their customer record.
• Voice messages - allow the person doing a job to hear the symptoms exactly as described by the customer. Customers talk faster than most service writers type. This is a great way to handle descriptions of unusual noises or intermittent failures.

Motive Power has these customer information and business building features:

• Customer information - Motive Power tracks two names for each customer. This can be used for families with different last names or to tie a customer's name to their business name. It keeps e-mail addresses and unlimited phone numbers for each customer. You can set pricing levels and tax types for each customer.
• Vehicles/Equipment - allows any number of units for each customer. It tracks 10 facts about each unit, such as make, model year, license, serial number, color, etc. The service history of each unit is available together with the ability to see the details on any service by displaying the work order that contains that service. A location is provided for each unit for shops that do on-site or mobile service.
• Customer contact - Motive Power can print or e-mail reminders as services become due. An interface to a third party reminder service is provided for shops that prefer that approach.
• QuickBooks integration - If you run QuickBooks Pro 2002 or better, Motive Power can automatically record your partial payments and finalized invoices in QuickBooks.

Motive Power is easily dialed in to your needs:

• Invoice formatting - provides a great deal of control over the appearance of the printed work order. Custom graphics, colors and fonts are provided for the work order heading. Several areas are available for custom text so that you can put your hours and policies in as much or as little detail as you prefer.
• Supplies charges - lets you add an overhead charge to each work order. The title, percentage, minimum and maximum amounts, and tax treatment of these charges are under your control.
• Sales taxes - are easy to set up and change. You can apply different percentages to labor, parts and sublet items. The program provides for multiple different taxing authorities. It covers odds cases such as the Florida law that does not tax labor on labor only tickets.
• Job scoring setup - lets you dial in separate profit margins for labor, parts and sublet. You decide if tickets can be paid off below margin and by whom. You decide if time must be captured on labor operations, or if costs must be captured on parts and sublets. You decide if vendors must be picked from the vendor list on parts and sublets.
• Dropdown lists - are shipped with information filled in so you can get started right away. You can add or remove items from these lists. Lists include makes/models, engines, vehicle types, colors, parts pricing, customer types, order statuses, job titles, sublet types, vendors, part types, and payment types.
• Job titles - are the most powerful part of Motive Power. Each time you add a job on a work order you start by picking a job type. Job titles include a job description and a labor operation type. Types include things like brakes, diagnosis, fuel injection, etc. Job titles can also include time charged, service intervals, and whether this particular job title should generate a customer reminder.
• Personnel - lists all your workers and what types of operations each worker can be assigned. You set your hourly billing rates here as well as the hourly cost of having each particular worker on the job. These figures are used in job scoring and reports to help you analyze profitability and set rates.
• Security - lets you decide which workers are permitted to make changes to your data. Decide who does work orders, changes customer information, alters your custom settings and generates reports. You can limit who can see and alter timeclock figures, who can pay off a ticket that is below margin, and who can override the selling price of parts and sublets.
• Reminders - are the best way to build your business. Motive Power provides you with the ability to print reminder postcards or e-mail reminders. If you don't want to do that job yourself, Motive Power provides a connection to a third party reminder service. This company, CustomerLink, uses information from Alldata to decide when to send out reminders on your behalf.
• Warnings - are the way that Motive Power tells you that something needs to be done. You decide how often to do backups, send reminders, and recover space on your hard disk. When those items come due, the program gives you a gentle reminder by putting a cloud across the sun of the Daily Task button.

Motive Power provides a variety of reports like: (most reports can be saved in HTML format)

• Parts ordering - helps you to get the items you need.
  • The replace parts report shows you all the items you used from stock in a given period. The report gives you a list of what you need to get from each vendor to replace those items.
  • The parts on tickets report shows you everything you put on works orders since a given time. Typically you would do your morning write up and then print this report of the parts you put on tickets in the last hour or two in order to get them coming. This insures that you do not forget an item.
• Timeclock reports - give you a way to see exactly what happened.
  • The entry detail report shows the exact start and stop times or hand entered entries for each job on each ticket done in the time period you specify.
  • The invoice detail report shows you every minute for a specified work order or invoice.
  • The time invoiced report shows the total time spent. You can show this by invoice, day week, or month. You can see the activity for one or all techs and one or all operations. This is a great way to see the breakdown of work in your shop. For example you may want to see the total time spent on brakes for the last three months.
• Sales reports - help you with gross sales figures and profit analysis.
  • The sales recap shows you total sales by period for labor operations, techs, parts types and vehicle makes.
  • The below score report details invoices that failed to meet your labor or parts or sublet margins.
  • The detail profit report gives you the breakdown of an individual work order.
  • The reminders sent report shows you the customers that were contacted for additional work.
  • The reminders due report shows you which customers are due to be reminder about which services.
  • The job analysis report shows you how many times each labor operation has been performed in a given time period. You can also specify makes models and years of vehicles or equipment to be help you make decisions about the work load in the shop and skill levels needed for workers.
• Logs - give you a way to review the history of what happened in your shop.
  • The license log shows you the history of license plates and owners for each vehicle. This is very helpful in states where the license plates change regularly.
  • The e-mail log is a history of whom you sent e-mail to when and for what purpose.
  • The order log shows you the history of a work order and any associated estimates and invoices. It also details the original estimate price versus the finished price and gives you a way to look at tickets that were started but never invoiced.
  • The payments log shows you when and how you took in money. Details cover advanced and partial payments as well showing whether payments were made in cash, by check, or with a credit card.
• Exports - give you a way to send data from Motive Power to other programs.
  • Most of the reports can be saved in HTML format for use by other programs.
  • The invoiced sales export includes details on jobs from finalized invoices. The info can be sent to Microsoft Excel 2000 or better as a pivot table, or exported as tab-delimited ASCII.
  • The invoiced parts export includes details on parts grouped by type from finalized invoices. This can be sent to Microsoft Excel 2000 or better as a pivot table, or exported as tab-delimited ASCII.

Daily tasks show you things that you need to do such as:

• Cashbox balancing - to help insure that the money taken in is accounted for and deposited. All payments not deposited are detailed. Because Motive Power has no required daily or weekly processing, you can make deposits when it is most convenient for you.
• Backup - insures that your data is secure in case of machine failure. The short term backup button makes quick snapshots of the current state of your active data. We recommend that you do this at least once a day. The long term backup should be done to some type of media that you take home. This protects you in cases of fire, vandalism, or total hard drive failure. We recommend that you do this at least once a week.
• Summary - provides you with details on recent shop activity. Totals are shown for parts, labor, sublets, supplies, discounts and sales taxes. Gross parts, labor and sublet totals are shown for each type of labor operation. Hours on the job, sales, and profitability for each type of labor operation are shown for each tech. The default setting is for a daily report but you can set any range to create weekly and monthly reports as well.
• Reminders - bring in more business. When there are reminders due to be sent, the reminders button lights up. You click the button to print reminder postcards or the button to e-mail reminders. The settings are done in a different part of the program so you do not see any of that in the daily task area.
• Recover Space - to get back disk space used by outdated voice messages. When messages are older than the date you specify, Motive Power asks you for permission to perform the physical deletion of these messages.

Motive Power Utilities:

• GKImport – Enables import of GarageKeeper 2000 customers and vehicles into Motive Power. It is included on the Motive Power CD, or you can download it here.
• Parts Catalog – Enables import of parts information into parts list for use inside Motive Power. This utility can import GarageKeeper inventories as well as other parts information that can be massaged into the proper format. It is installed with Motive Power.
• Combine Engines – Allows you to combine any engine with any other engine. For example you may have set up both 2.7L and 2700CC as engines when they are really both the same size. You can download this utility here.