Job Management Software for Engineering Workshops

That is normal for engineering workshops. Each job can carry the detail it needs.

Keep them simple.

Repairs and build jobs can both be handled as jobs with their own hours and costs.

Keep it. WorkGuru handles the shop and job side.

No, that is the normal shape of a general engineering workshop and it is a bad fit for systems that assume repeat production. WorkGuru organises around the job rather than the product, so a breakdown repair, a one-off machining job and a three-month fabrication project can all sit in the same system carrying different amounts of detail. The quick job has a customer, some hours and a couple of parts. The project has tasks, purchase orders, documents and a schedule. Neither has to pretend to be the other, and both report into the same view of what the shop is carrying.

Yes, and they behave differently in ways worth planning for. New build work is usually scoped up front and costed against an estimate. Repair work is frequently quoted blind, because you do not know what is wrong until it is apart. The practical approach is to open the repair job with what you know, record the strip-and-inspect hours against it, and update the scope once you can see the damage. The hours spent investigating are real cost and belong on the job, which is precisely the cost most workshops never capture.

Open the job anyway. Quote the inspection, record the hours against it, and extend the job once the scope is known. The alternative most workshops fall into is doing the strip-down unpriced, discovering four days of work, and then trying to have a commercial conversation from a standing start with no record of the time already spent. Having the inspection hours on the job changes that conversation, because you are showing the customer a record rather than making a claim.

Yes, and for a general workshop this is often the most useful thing the system does. Because every job carries its labour, materials and purchases, you can compare outcomes across types of work — repairs against fabrication, one customer against another, small jobs against large. The pattern that surfaces most often is that the small urgent jobs everyone assumes are profitable are carrying setup and admin time nobody was counting, while the long dull jobs are quietly paying the bills.

That is the intent. A tradesperson needs to see the job, record what they spent on it and get back to work. Timesheets are recorded against the job or task rather than through a separate administrative process. Be realistic about adoption, though: time recording only produces useful numbers if it happens close to when the work happened. A workshop where everyone reconstructs their week on Friday afternoon will get Friday-afternoon-quality data, and no software fixes that.

Yes. Documents attach to the project, so drawings, sketches, ITPs, photos and supplier paperwork sit with the work they belong to rather than in a shared drive that only one person understands. The practical test is whether someone who was not involved can pick up the job on Monday and find what they need. That is usually worth more than the storage itself.

Yes, and they are genuinely different things. Consumables you hold — welding wire, gas, discs, common fasteners — sit in inventory and get issued to jobs. Material bought for one specific job goes on a purchase order raised against that project. Keeping them separate matters because it stops your stock value drifting and stops job costs being understated by the consumables nobody attributes.

Record it on the same job. Additional hours, extra material and further purchases go onto the existing project, with the original allowance still visible behind them. In a general workshop the change is rarely a formal variation — it is the customer ringing to add something while the machine is already apart. Capturing it as it happens is the difference between invoicing what you did and invoicing what you remembered.

Your accounting system owns the ledger, the tax and the statutory reporting. WorkGuru owns the job: what was quoted, who worked on it, what was bought for it and what it ended up costing. The two connect so invoices and supplier bills flow through. The distinction that matters day to day is that accounting tells you the business made money last month, and job costing tells you which jobs made it.

Not primarily. If your core requirement is asset-centric planned maintenance with condition monitoring and compliance scheduling, a dedicated CMMS will go deeper. WorkGuru is strongest where the work is job-shaped: quoted, scheduled, costed and invoiced. Plenty of workshops do both, and the practical question is which side is the bigger problem. If it is knowing what the work cost and whether it was worth doing, this is the right tool. If it is knowing when the next service is due on 400 assets, it probably is not.