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During a recent audit of our service repair orders by an accounting firm they are questioning our practice of electronic time flagging of repair orders vs lick and stick flagging. They do the auditing for several dealerships and they are unfamiliar with this. I supplied them with a copy of GM policies and procedures which states basically that time records need to be tracked and matched to the repair order but does not say anything about having to use flag sheets. We have been using this system for years and I find it hard to beleive there are not more doing this as opposed to paper flags. We are using REY REY as our systems provider. Am I alone or are there many others using electronic flagging?

While far from the norm it certainly isn't that unusual. Typically from what I've seen, you can print out an "flag sheet" showing what R.O.s were paid to the tech and then work backward to account for the time on the R.O. Often these sheets are given to the techs weekly or daily so they can follow their progress and check for errors.

Much more frequent are shops that do both - lick and stick and electronic. Lick and stick is used just for the shop like time punching and efficiency calcs) and electronic is really what is used for payroll.

Does it matter that much? Not that I've seen. Any half way controlled shop will be able to tell if someone is taking advantage of the system. The only issue is with just being "different". In both accounting and warranty audits, different isn't looked on so well. And normally when an examiner sees something different they probably just wonder what the shop is trying to hide. So I think that a lot of stores do it the traditional way just to keep from raising any red flags - even though there is nothing wrong with what they are doing.



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** Rob, Editor WD&S **
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robc@dealersedge.com