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SwannSwann Retail Help

Find a vehicle

If you repair vehicles, Swann Retail keeps each customer’s vehicles on file and lets you find any of them in seconds. Open Vehicles from the Sales menu to search across your whole store — handy when a car rolls in and you have the plate but not the customer’s name.

Vehicles come with the mechanic vehicles tools. If you don’t see Vehicles in your Sales menu, they aren’t on your plan — contact Swann Software to add them.

Search by plate or VIN

Section titled “Search by plate or VIN”

Type at least 2 characters of a licence plate or VIN into the search box. Results update as you type and show each vehicle’s year, make and model, its plate and its VIN; press Load more to see more matches. Click a vehicle to open its record.

If nothing matches, try a shorter or different part of the plate or VIN. A vehicle you’ve only just added can take a moment to show up in search.

Add a vehicle to a customer

Section titled “Add a vehicle to a customer”

Vehicles live on the customer they belong to, so you add one from the customer, not from the search screen:

  1. Open the customer (see Add & find a customer).
  2. In their Vehicles section, press Add vehicle.
  3. Fill in what you know — Make, Model, Year, Colour, Odometer, VIN, Licence plate, Engine, Trim and any Notes.
  4. Have the VIN? Enter it and press Decode VIN to fill in the details for you. Check what it filled in before you save; if it can’t find the VIN, enter the details yourself.
  5. Press Create.

Use Edit or Delete on a vehicle’s row to change or remove it. Deleting takes the vehicle off the customer’s list, but past service records and orders keep their link to it, so your history still makes sense.

Adding, editing and deleting vehicles needs the Manage catalog permission; without it the buttons are hidden and the vehicles are view-only.

A vehicle’s record

Section titled “A vehicle’s record”

A vehicle’s page shows its details and, depending on your plan, two running logs:

  • Service history — press Log a service to record a visit: the Service date, Odometer, and the three C’s — the Complaint, its Cause and the Correction — plus any notes.
  • Diagnostic scans — press Log a scan to record the trouble codes a scan read, with a freeze frame and a note for each code. A clean scan with no codes is worth saving too.

Logging a service or a scan needs the Sell permission.

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