Adding washers and dryers
Every drum on your floor needs a record before it can take an order. Here is what that record holds, and where each part of it turns up later.
The seven things it asks for
Add machine sits at the top right of the Machines screen. Four of the seven fields are required, and the form will not submit until all four have something in them: label, type, model and serial number.
| Field | Required | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Machine label | Yes | The short name staff say out loud — Washer 1, Dryer 2. Up to 50 characters. |
| Type | Yes | Washer or dryer, and it decides which orders the machine can take. |
| Model | Yes | The maker's model name. It is the heading on the row. |
| Serial number | Yes | The number on the plate, for when an engineer asks. |
| Status | No | Active, under maintenance, or decommissioned. A new machine is active. |
| Capacity | No | Drum size in kilograms. Left blank, it reads as a dash everywhere. |
| Next service due | No | A date you pick. Nothing fills it in for you. |
Two rules bite on save. A label has to be unique within the outlet, so there is only ever one Washer 1 at Mill Street. A serial number has to be unique outright — enter one that already belongs to another machine and you are told so, rather than ending up with two records for one drum.
Type is the field with consequences. A status that names a kind only accepts that kind, so an order in Drying will not go into anything you recorded as a washer. See Loading a machine.
A machine belongs to the outlet you were signed into when you added it. Switch outlets and you are looking at a different set of machines.
What the list does with it
Six tabs run across the top, each with its own count: all, washers, dryers, maintenance, decommissioned, and service due. Search matches the model, the serial number and the label, so the number off the plate finds the row. There is a list view and a card view, and the list carries utilisation, lifetime cycles, uptime, next service and status as columns of their own.
Above the tabs sit five figures for the whole outlet: how many washers, how many dryers, average utilisation across the active machines, total cycles all time, and how many machines fall due for a service within 45 days.
Clicking a row opens that machine's panel — specifications, performance, and the next service date — with Edit machine and Decommission at the bottom of it. The edit form is the same seven fields you filled in.
Who can add one
The owner always can. Of the roles a business starts with, Manager and Staff can add and edit machines; Cashier sees the screen and every number on it but none of the buttons; Driver has no access to the screen at all.