A warranty exchange costs you bay time even though it bills the customer nothing. If you pay your technicians for that time, this is the order of operations that gets their hours in front of the Installer Profitability report so you can settle pay from one screen.
**The one rule that decides everything**
A work order only carries a connection back to an invoice if it was created FROM that invoice. You can create a standalone work order from Service > Work Orders > New Work Order, and it schedules and clocks perfectly well, but there is no way to connect it to an invoice afterward. Installer Profitability finds a technician through the invoice's work order, so a tech whose hours sit on a standalone work order shows nothing on the pay report and posts at 0% on Technician Efficiency.
So: build the invoice first, then create the work order from it. Not the other way round.
**Step by step**
- When the customer comes back with a problem, create a **Repair Invoice** first, from Point of Sale > Invoicing > + New Invoice, or from the customer's detail page. Pick the customer and the vehicle. Do this before you touch the Service menu. (A standard invoice works identically if you would rather not flag the visit as repair work.)
- Add a **labor line** with your best estimate of the hours, at your normal labor rate. Leave the rate alone. You will zero out what the customer pays at the end, not the rate the technician is measured on.
- On that same invoice, click **Create Work Order** and assign the technician. This is the link that makes everything downstream work.
- From the work order, click **Schedule Install** and drop it on the calendar. The technician clocks in and out on the work order as they work. More than one person can be clocked onto the same work order.
- If the product turns out to be defective, do the swap on a **separate Warranty Invoice**: negative quantity on the bad unit, positive quantity on the replacement, one in and one out at $0. Put no labor line and no work order on the warranty invoice. It stays purely an inventory document, which is what it is built to be, and it still drives Defective Inventory and the vendor return. See "How to Process a Warranty Claim" for that side of it.
- Back on the repair invoice, correct the labor hours to what the technician actually worked, then click **+ Discount** and discount the full labor amount so the customer's balance is $0. Post it.
The technician's hours and dollars now appear on Installer Profitability under their name, and your commission percentage calculates against real labor dollars instead of zero.
**Why the labor does not go on the warranty invoice**
You can put labor on a warranty invoice, and if the work order was created from that invoice the technician does get credit for it. The catch is that warranty tickets are excluded from Installer Profitability by default, so capturing that labor at payroll means ticking the Warranty checkbox, which also pulls the parts swap into the report. The defective unit goes out at cost and the replacement goes out at cost against zero revenue, so the numbers read as a loss. Keeping the labor on a repair invoice means that checkbox stays unticked and your payout figures stay clean.
**Turn this on first**
None of the time tracking works until you enable it. Go to Settings > Work Orders and turn on labor time tracking. Turning on auto-clock on status changes as well cuts down on technicians forgetting to punch in.
**The clock and the pay report are two different things**
Clocking in and out records hours against the work order and shows on Work Order Summary and Technician Efficiency. It does not feed pay. Installer Profitability calculates from the billed labor line, not the clock. That is why step 2 matters: with no labor line carrying real hours at a real rate, the technician shows zero for that job no matter how long they were punched in. Use the clock to check whether the hours you billed were fair, not as the source of the hours themselves.
**Two limitations worth knowing before payroll**
Only the primary technician on a work order is credited. There is a second technician field, and it prints on Work Order Summary, but Installer Profitability pays the primary only. If two people regularly split a warranty job, settle the second technician's share by hand from the Work Order Summary.
The two labor reports count by different dates. Technician Efficiency counts only work orders that are closed and dates them by when they closed. Work Order Summary counts all work orders and dates them by when they were created. A job that checks in during one pay period and closes in the next lands in different weeks on the two reports.