Parts on a piece of equipment

Some equipment is a single thing. A bullet camera is not — it is a housing, a lens module and an IR board, and when it fails it is one of those three that failed, not “the camera”.

Parts breaks a unit into the components inside it, so the thing you replace is the thing that is recorded.

Equipment → the selected unit → Parts

What a part carries

A part is tracked in the same way as the unit that holds it — its own model number, serial number, status and date. That is what lets you answer “when was the lens replaced?” without opening a single job.

Adding and linking

Two buttons sit above the list:

• Add Part creates a new component on this unit and asks for its details.
• Link Part(s) attaches something that already exists on your records, rather than creating a duplicate of it.

Use Link Part(s) when the component is already a unit in its own right — a spare you have been tracking since you bought it. Use Add Part when it only exists as part of this machine.

Equipment that is a part

Equipment → Client’s Equipment

A unit with components shows a Sub Part(s) count in the list, which opens the parts underneath it.

The other side of this is the Equipment as a part tickbox on the add equipment form. Ticking it says this unit is a component — a housing, a compressor, a lens — rather than a machine somebody would call about on its own. The equivalent on a job is This is a part when adding equipment on site, and on an inventory item it is the Sub Item(s) relationship; see sub items and parts.

Why bother

Parts are what make a service history worth reading. A job that says “replaced the IR LED board, serial IR-24LED” on a camera you have tracked for three years tells you the board is now under a fresh warranty and the housing is not — and the next engineer sees that before they drive out.