Tekmetric Multi-Shop: Centralized Data Management

What is Centralized Data Management?

Within Tekmetric Multi-Shop, you can manage six different types of data across all your shops from one central location:

• Discounts 
• Job Categories
• Payment Types
• Lead Sources
• Canned Jobs
• Inspections

You can create new data, edit existing data, and delete data all from within the Tekmetric Multi-Shop product. Then, you can decide which shops get which data by using the publishing functionality that's available.

Let's use discounts as an example below. The table looks very similar to the discounts table in individual shops, with a couple new additions:

• Last Modified: This is the last date/time that the individual discount line was edited within the Multi-Shop product
• Published To: This tells you how many shops currently contain the discount. If you click on the link, a popover will appear that lists out every shop that contains the discount, what the status of the discount is (more on this below), and what the last published date for the discount in that shop was. 
• Shop Filter: You can use this to quickly filter the discounts list by "published to" shop. For example, if I wanted to see which discounts were published to Shop A, I would select Shop A in the filter. 

Publishing New Data

Continuing with discounts as our example, let's walk through the flow for publishing data to shops. 

When I hit the New Discount button, a modal appears where I can enter in the discount details.

After saving the discount (Online Coupon in the example below), it appears within my list. At this time it is NOT published to any shops, as indicated by the dash in the Published To column. In order to publish the discount to shops, I have to hit the check box next to it, then hit the Publish Discounts button in the upper right corner of the table.

When I hit this button, a modal appears that provides a list of all shops in my organization. I can pick and choose which shops I want the discount to be published to. After making my selections, I hit Publish to Selected Shops. 

After hitting this button, the discounts are published to my shops! The "Published To" column for the discount in the discounts table displays "2 shops" and when I hit the link, a popover appears with all 2 shops listed out, along with status and last published date.

Organization-Managed Data in Individual Shops

Within each individual shop, data that has been published from the Multi-Shop product will appear as greyed out and disabled (see greyed out discounts below). Individual shops can still maintain their own shop-specific discounts (non-greyed out discount below), in addition to the organization-managed discounts. 

However, organization-managed canned jobs behave differently. Only Job Title and Job Category are disabled in individual shops (see screenshots below). Individual shops can still edit the body of the canned jobs that have been published down, meaning they can change labor, parts, discounts, and fees if they want to.

Editing Existing Data 

Let's walk through an example of making a change to data in the Multi-Shop product and publishing it down to stores. 

Using the Family and Friends discount as an example, I simply have to click on the line of data I want to change. This opens an edit form where I can make my changes and hit the green check mark to save them. At this time, the changes have NOT been published down to shops. 

If I click on the "2 shops" link after making my change, I can see that the status for each shop has been updated to "Changed". This indicates to me that the shops have an outdated version of the discount, since I haven't yet published the new version of the discount down to the shops. 

After going through the publishing flow described in the section above, the discount's status will appear as Published for each shop. All shops have the updated discount! 

Please note that editing canned jobs exhibits different behavior. When publishing a canned job to a shop that doesn't yet have it, all canned job fields will be populated in the shop. However, when re-publishing to a shop that already contains it, you'll have two choices for what type of publish you want to perform:

• Update job title and category only: This will only overwrite job title and category in individual shops. Any other field updates will not be published to individual shops.
• Overwrite entire canned job: This will overwrite the entire canned job in individual shops and populate the shop with your updates. However, shop canned jobs that contain inventory parts cannot be completely overwritten. These jobs will only have title and category updated.

Unpublishing Data from Shops

Let's walk through an example of unpublishing data from a shop. First, select the three-dot menu on a discount line and select Delete. A modal will pop up asking you to confirm your choice, and you can hit Delete or cancel your choice.

After doing this, the discount line will be highlighted in red. This means that the discount line needs some sort of action taken. You can "undelete" the discount line using the "x" icon on the right. This will clear the red highlight. However, to unpublish data from shops, I need to check the checkbox and go through the publish flow for whatever shops I want to delete the data from. Essentially, we are "publishing the delete" to the selected shops.

After publishing the delete, the red highlight will be cleared and the "Published To" shop count will be updated. You can see in the example below that the Mailer Coupon discount was unpublished from one shop (was previously published to 2 shops and is now only published to 1).