by Tim McDonnell

As part of our celebration of the 20^th anniversary of the Mitchell shop management solution, we’ve compiled 20 helpful tips for Manager SE users. We reviewed literally hundreds of ideas and selected 20 awesome tips and tricks from shops using this software every day and participating in the Manager Forum, an interactive community of Mitchell 1 Manager SE users.

These tips have been shared by shops just like yours. In their own words, they discuss their experiences and ideas that make their workday better for all concerned – and that includes you. We’ll be publishing the tips here in the Manager SE blog — one at a time — over the next several months. Enjoy!

Manager SE Tip #1

What to Do With a Vehicle that a Customer No Longer Owns

“I use Excel and MS Query to create custom mailing lists; works great. The problem is some customers have had 10+ cars over the years and these could have the same last-in date and address. I can de-dupe the list down to one address per customer with software, but that also removes any other active cars the customer brings here. I’d like to purge cars that have not been here for a long while. Any ideas? Thanks.”

“We made up a separate account called ‘Sold Vehicles.’ If we know that the customer sold, junked or totalled a vehicle, we move it to this file. It helps to clean up customer accounts. Sometimes people get emails about vehicles they got rid of; so this helps with that situation. When moving it to ‘Sold Vehicles’ we do a few things: in Vehicle Memo we enter customer’s name. We delete the license plate & copy any Recommendations into the Vehicle Memo (so they don’t show on future follow-up reports). Then we delete the inspection date or move it to the memo (for same reason). Hope this helps.” [To reduce errors, Change Ownership is only visible in the 3 tab file maintenance view]

If you’d like to read more user tips on the Manager Forum, simply click on the Forum button in the toolbar of your Manager SE program (see graphic below). Even if you’re away from Manager SE, you can still be connected to this community on the Internet at www.managerforum.net and gain valuable insights from content shared by your peers. Take a moment to open the Forum and check out what you’ve been missing!