Reserve parts for upcoming job — how to?

Question

Hey all — running into a situation where I've got a big install job coming up next week and need to make sure the parts don't get grabbed by someone else for a different job. I know there's a reservation feature in the inventory module but I've never actually used it. Is it just a matter of flagging items against the work order, or is there a separate process? Also does it actually hold the stock or is it more of a soft reservation that someone could still override?

Pro tip from the field: if you're doing multi-day jobs, definitely get familiar with this. Nothing worse than showing up day 2 and finding out your thermostat got used on an emergency call.

Sylvia Chen · Accepted Answer

Reservation creates a hard hold. Here's the flow:

• Open the work order → Inventory tab
• Add parts → check 'Reserve for this job'
• Set reservation date (defaults to job scheduled date)
• Parts show as 'Reserved' in stock view, not 'Available'

Dispatches and other techs can see the hold but can't override without Admin or Manager permissions. Reservation auto-releases if job is cancelled or rescheduled past the reservation window.

Ray DeLuca · Answer

Yeah what Sylvia said... though heads up, the reservation window maxes out at 14 days. Learned that the hard way on a commercial job that got pushed.

Gwen Albright · Answer

Solid info above. One workflow note from our team: we actually train our techs to reserve parts *immediately* when a job is scheduled, not day-of. Caught a few near-misses where two different jobs got booked for the same week needing the same specialty controller.

Also worth noting — the Inventory → Reservations report lets you see everything reserved across all open jobs. I pull it weekly for our ops meeting. Helps spot jobs that might need part substitutions before the tech is onsite.