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I have noticed over a couple months now, the way my manager does some things can be improved. The way my previous manager trained me which i feel is correct and how my current one does things has some uncomfortable differences. So i noticed when getting Freon tanks he bills out the tanks to service, and when a technician requests it for a job he then bills it out again. now i know say a tank is empty and the inventory shows full or close obviously techs are requesting and being its in the shop and used only by the technicians billing it to service.

this happens with sales for a lot of boutique/display items which do greatly tend to disappear with salesman for cars or maybe themselves. Which most of it being on the display in sales when checking inventory billing to them but a lot of it is "written off/billed to them already"

so some of this makes me uncomfortable which there is a couple other examples but these are two of the more recent. how would you guys handle this and what process would you do to prevent or handle if happened.

As far as billing freon. I know some managers that put it in inventory, bill it on the RO, and then bill the shortage to service. Your previous manger may have been doing this. It usually does have to billed out for warranty repairs, or you may risk losing the entire claim. You will probably never "break even" thinking that somehow all freon will be reported accurately. I used to inventory 16 lbs. per cylinder of 134a, and usually ended up pretty even.

Jaybee wrote:As far as billing freon. I know some managers that put it in inventory, bill it on the RO, and then bill the shortage to service. Your previous manger may have been doing this. It usually does have to billed out for warranty repairs, or you may risk losing the entire claim. You will probably never "break even" thinking that somehow all freon will be reported accurately. I used to inventory 16 lbs. per cylinder of 134a, and usually ended up pretty even.

i know it will never be 100% accurate Freon is never been cleanly done but the double billing I don't feel right about, maybe its just me? me and my previous manager receipted it ad billed to ro and when a new tank was needed billed whatever the difference was to service account being it is likely not asked for or reported used.

We used to have a huge issue with Freon shortages. We now keep the machines in the parts department and when the tech needs one, they ask us for it. We record the reading when we hand it out and bill a large amount on the repair order (enough to raise a flag if not corrected). When the tech is finished, the machine is returned to us and we then take another reading and correct the RO to reflect the actual amount used (difference between readings). We are in charge of filling the machines and we record the numbers on the tanks so that we know how much we are getting out of a cylinder. It's been fairly painless and we no longer have shortages.

PartScott wrote:We used to have a huge issue with Freon shortages. We now keep the machines in the parts department and when the tech needs one, they ask us for it. We record the reading when we hand it out and bill a large amount on the repair order (enough to raise a flag if not corrected). When the tech is finished, the machine is returned to us and we then take another reading and correct the RO to reflect the actual amount used (difference between readings). We are in charge of filling the machines and we record the numbers on the tanks so that we know how much we are getting out of a cylinder. It's been fairly painless and we no longer have shortages.

i may have to make room for ours, especially with this yf stuff. but that's not a bad process.

Source accounting or something maybe? Bills it on a shop ticket that relieves parts inventory for the whole container and when billed to an RO it relieves shop supplies account? I know years ago the dealer I was at used sources for different accounts.

We stopped freon loss a while ago.
We have the whole tank billed to the service dept on an open monthly RO shop ticket as we hand it out. Each time a tech stops by the counter and lets us know to bill x amount on an RO, we do.
Then we credit the shop RO lb for lb (or gram or oz) for each unit billed to a customer RO.

No more shortage for the parts dept, Period.

MSInventory wrote:We stopped freon loss a while ago.
We have the whole tank billed to the service dept on an open monthly RO shop ticket as we hand it out. Each time a tech stops by the counter and lets us know to bill x amount on an RO, we do.
Then we credit the shop RO lb for lb (or gram or oz) for each unit billed to a customer RO.

No more shortage for the parts dept, Period.

oh i really like that.

at my last place we had open shop ticket closed at eom here we just bill and close as its used . but i really like that process. thank you

We close our shop RO at EOM always. Either way, it works out. If you pass a cylinder over the counter close to the end of the month, it just gets credited back to the shop lb by lb the next month and so on.
If everyone does their job, nobody is out anything. It should be a wash. If a tech fails to inform parts of freon use, then the service manager eats the loss. Accountability, that's all. How can a parts department be responsible for a product that they cannot control because the machine is in the shop?

MSInventory wrote:We close our shop RO at EOM always. Either way, it works out. If you pass a cylinder over the counter close to the end of the month, it just gets credited back to the shop lb by lb the next month and so on.
If everyone does their job, nobody is out anything. It should be a wash. If a tech fails to inform parts of freon use, then the service manager eats the loss. Accountability, that's all. How can a parts department be responsible for a product that they cannot control because the machine is in the shop?

makes absolute sense, hard to rely on techs for accurate amounts to begin with let alone if its always in the shop where their personal cars tend to also roll in and out of let alone with the cost of yf!