Parts vs labour items
Catalog items come in three kinds: Service, Part, and Labour. The kind decides how an item is priced, where it sits on a document, and how it behaves in the smart suggestions. Getting it right keeps your quotes and invoices clean.
The three kinds
- Service — a job a customer asks for, like “Major service” or “Brake inspection”. Services are what the smart suggestions hang off: pick a service and GM proposes the parts it usually needs.
- Part — a physical item you fit: pads, filters, oil. Parts carry a sell price and, optionally, a cost price so GM can track your margin.
- Labour — work time. Labour codes carry book-time hours and price off your labour rate. See Add a labour code.
On the document: the PDF and public pages section lines by kind — Service, then Parts, then Labour, then Call-out — so the customer reads a tidy, grouped invoice instead of a jumble.
Cost price and profit
A part can carry a cost price — what you pay the supplier — alongside its sell price. This is an owner-only field: it’s stripped from what other staff see. When a part with a cost price is added to a quote or invoice, GM snapshots that cost onto the line, so later price changes don’t rewrite the margin on past jobs.
That snapshot is what feeds the profit view — see Tracking parts cost on invoices.