The Autofid Operational Backbone: Suppliers, Staff Permissions, Workshop Overhead, and Subscription Management Explained

The most visible parts of any workshop management system are the customer-facing features: the job cards, the vehicle listings, the invoices, the dashboard numbers. But beneath all of that lies an operational infrastructure that determines whether those features work correctly, securely, and at the scale your business needs.

This guide explores the foundational systems in Autofid that most users configure once and rely on every day without thinking about them — until something is misconfigured and the consequences show up in incorrect profit calculations, inaccurate VAT figures, or a team member with too much (or too little) system access. Understanding how these systems work gives you full control over your Autofid account and ensures every number it produces is reliable.

Supplier Management: The Foundation of Cost Attribution

Every meaningful cost in your Autofid account — vehicle purchases, parts, subcontractor fees, utilities, equipment — should be linked to a Supplier record. Suppliers are not just a contact list; they are the backbone of your cost attribution system. Without complete supplier records, your VAT reclaim data is incomplete and your expense analysis is unreliable.

What a Supplier Record Contains

Supplier Transaction History

Every vehicle purchased from a supplier and every business expense linked to a supplier appears in that supplier's transaction history within Autofid. This gives you an instant supplier spend analysis: how much total business you have given to a specific supplier over any period, what categories of expenditure are attributable to them, and whether the VAT on those transactions has been correctly recorded for your returns.

When negotiating with a supplier, being able to produce a precise total spend figure across 12 months — broken down by category — is a powerful leverage tool. Autofid gives you this data instantly.

Supplier Catalogue: Pre-Loaded Parts Pricing at Your Fingertips

Autofid's Supplier Catalogue feature allows you to import and maintain a database of products from each supplier — complete with part numbers, descriptions, unit costs, and applicable VAT rates. Once a catalogue is populated, technicians creating job cards can look up parts directly rather than manually entering pricing each time.

Benefits of the Catalogue System

• Price Accuracy — eliminates manual pricing errors that result in undercharging customers or incorrect VAT calculations
• Speed — technicians spend less time on administrative data entry and more time on productive work
• Consistency — all technicians use the same price list, preventing inconsistent markups across different staff members
• Traceability — every part used on a job is traced to a specific supplier catalogue entry, creating a complete parts audit trail
• Markup Management — catalogue entries include both cost price and recommended charge price, enforcing your margin policy automatically

Maintaining the Catalogue

Supplier catalogues are living documents that require periodic updates when prices change. Autofid allows catalogue entries to be updated individually or in bulk. When a supplier announces a price increase, your purchasing manager updates the affected entries once — and every job card created from that point forward automatically uses the new pricing. There is no risk of different technicians carrying different (and potentially outdated) price lists in their heads.

"The supplier catalogue is the single most effective tool for eliminating parts margin leakage in a busy workshop. When every part has a pre-configured cost price and charge price, there is no ambiguity, no negotiation with the customer on price, and no accidental undercharging that eats into your workshop profitability."

Workshop Overhead Configuration: The Financial Engine Behind True Profitability

Autofid's overhead system is what distinguishes it from simple invoicing software. Most garage management systems track what you charged and what you paid for parts. Autofid goes further by tracking what it costs your business to operate and attributing those costs proportionally to your vehicles and jobs.

Setting Up Overhead Categories

Navigate to Settings → Workshop Overhead to configure your running cost categories. Each category has three required fields:

• Category Name — a descriptive label (e.g., "Building Rent", "Public Liability Insurance", "Director Salary")
• Amount — the cost in your account currency
• Allocation Period — Monthly or Yearly (Autofid converts yearly amounts to monthly equivalents automatically)

Categories can be reordered for clarity and toggled inactive when a cost is no longer applicable — without deleting the historical data. This is important for businesses that change premises, end a financing agreement, or restructure their fixed cost base during the year.

The Shared Overhead Toggle

For businesses that operate both a dealership and a workshop from the same premises, certain overhead costs are shared across both operations (rent, insurance) while others may be specific to one side (e.g., specialist workshop equipment financing is a garage-only cost). Autofid's isShared flag on each overhead category lets you designate which costs are allocated to the entire business versus which are allocated to specific operations.

Overhead Category Reordering

The order in which overhead categories are displayed in your configuration affects readability and review efficiency during financial meetings. Autofid supports drag-to-reorder functionality so you can organise categories in a way that makes intuitive sense for your business — by cost magnitude, by cost type, or by department.

Role-Based Access Control: The Right Permissions for Every Role

Autofid's permission system is the security and workflow control layer of your account. It governs not just what users can see, but what actions they can take — preventing accidental data deletion, maintaining financial data privacy, and ensuring each team member operates within their appropriate scope of responsibility.

The Permission Architecture

Autofid uses a granular permission model organised around functional capabilities. Each permission is a boolean flag (on/off) assigned to a user role. Here is a complete map of available permissions and their operational implications:

Designing Roles for Your Workshop

A typical automotive business with a mixed dealership and workshop operation might configure the following roles:

• Owner / Dealer Principal — all permissions enabled
• Workshop Manager — canManageJobs, canManageTechnicians, canManageSuppliers, canManageCustomers, canAccessReports
• Service Advisor — canManageJobs, canManageCustomers
• Technician — canManageJobs (limited — view and update only, no invoicing)
• Sales Executive — canManageVehicles, canManageCustomers
• Finance / Accountant — canManageFinancials, canAccessReports
• Receptionist — canManageCustomers (view only)

User Invitations: Adding Team Members in Under Two Minutes

Adding a new team member to Autofid requires no IT department and no hardware configuration. From the Users management panel:

1. Click Invite User
2. Enter the new user's name, email address, and phone number
3. Select their role and configure their individual permissions
4. Click Send Invitation

The invited user receives an email with a secure activation link. They click the link, set their password, and are immediately active in the system with exactly the permissions you assigned. The entire process takes under two minutes and requires no input from the new user other than setting their password.

Because Autofid runs entirely in the browser, new users need only a device (desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile) and an internet connection. There is no software to install, no VPN to configure, and no IT infrastructure required.

Subscription Plans: Understanding Your Account Limits

Autofid's subscription system allocates specific resource limits to each account, scaled according to the plan tier. Understanding these limits ensures your team never encounters unexpected restrictions during a busy period.

The core resource limits in every Autofid plan are:

Autofid tracks all of these limits in real time and displays current usage on the Subscriptions dashboard page. When you are approaching a limit, the system notifies you well in advance — giving you time to consider upgrading your plan before any disruption occurs. A limit value of -1 in the system means unlimited — a feature of enterprise-tier plans.

Trial Period

New accounts begin with a 14-day free trial on a selected plan tier. During the trial, all plan features are fully available. No payment method is required to start a trial. When the trial ends, the account moves to the selected paid plan, or can be downgraded to a different tier. The trial status is clearly displayed on the Subscriptions page along with the trial expiry date.

Audit Logging: Complete Accountability for Every Action

Autofid maintains a comprehensive Audit Log that records every significant action taken within the platform — who did it, what was changed, when it happened, and from which IP address. This is the system's accountability layer, and it serves three critical business functions:

1. Operational Accountability

When a vehicle record is unexpectedly modified, a job is closed without an invoice, or an expense entry disappears, the audit log tells you exactly who made the change and when. This prevents finger-pointing in your team and makes accountability clear and evidence-based.

2. Compliance Documentation

For businesses subject to GDPR, financial auditing standards, or franchise reporting requirements, the audit log provides the documentation needed to demonstrate that data access and modification is controlled, logged, and reviewable. Many franchise agreements require workshops to demonstrate this level of operational governance.

3. Security Investigation

The audit log captures authentication events — successful logins, failed login attempts, and password resets — with IP addresses and timestamps. If a security incident occurs, this data enables your team to understand what happened and take corrective action quickly.

Audit log entries are retention-controlled — Autofid allows you to configure how long audit records are kept, balancing storage cost against compliance requirements. For most businesses, a 12-month retention period satisfies all common compliance obligations while keeping your storage usage manageable.

Real-Time Notifications: Staying Informed Without Being Overwhelmed

Autofid's notification system keeps team members informed about events relevant to their role — without flooding every user with alerts they cannot act on. Notification types include:

• 🔔 Job card status changes (assigned to you, completed, moved to on hold)
• 🔔 Vehicle sale completions and deposit collections
• 🔔 Customer warranty expiry alerts
• 🔔 Subscription usage warnings (approaching plan limits)
• 🔔 New user invitations accepted
• 🔔 System maintenance announcements
• 🔔 Failed background job alerts

Each user manages their notification preferences independently from their profile settings. This ensures that a technician who wants to be notified only when a job is assigned to them is not bothered by subscription billing alerts, while an owner who wants visibility over all major events can enable comprehensive notification coverage.

Notifications appear in the Autofid notification centre in real time and can also be delivered via email — ensuring important alerts reach team members even when they are away from their desk or working off-site. This combination of operational functionality, financial accountability, and system configurability is what makes Autofid not just a job management tool, but a complete operational platform for the modern automotive business.