Protect Your Business With An Auto Shop Management Software

“Receipts.” We all know the literal meaning of this term—those pieces of paper or emails/texts a retailer sends you as proof of purchase, in case you want to exchange or return an item down the road.

In a casual sense, “receipts” also mean “proof” in the event of a dispute. For example, if your dog could talk and claimed he definitely did not steal the pizza from the picnic table, you could show him “receipts,” which could be a photo your astonished friend snapped of him while he was dragging the pizza away. Busted!

As a business owner, you interact with receipts in two ways:

1. 1.You give receipts to your customers once their repair work is finished
2. 2.You get receipts when you purchase items for your shop (like parts)

Even though receipts exist in practically every industry, there’s a huge difference between the receipts customers get from an auto repair shop versus the receipts they’d get from a restaurant or clothing store.

Look at it this way: you don’t go to a restaurant and get an estimate for how much your food will cost. You see the prices on the menu, order, and then pay at the end. But in the auto repair world, we have to scope out the work with an inspection and estimate. That’s where the shop and the customer come to an understanding of the repair work that will occur, and get a preview of the cost, before any work gets done.

Without a solid inspection and estimate process, there can be a higher risk of misunderstandings and miscommunications, which can diminish customer loyalty and lead to credit card chargebacks. For example, a customer could misunderstand the severity of the need for a repair and decline it when they get their estimate, and leave a negative online review that their car still has issues. Or, a customer could say they don’t want a particular repair, but a service advisor misunderstands them. The repair happens, and the customer is upset when they get the final bill because they’d communicated that they didn’t want the repair.

That’s why estimates and receipts are extra important in our industry—they protect shops and customers. They give your customers peace of mind; they have a record of what repair work they got done on which day, and how much they paid. And in the event of a customer claiming a certain repair didn’t happen on a particular day, you could pull up your copy of the estimate and the receipt and set the record straight. You won’t have to deal with a frustrating back-and-forth process that can stretch out for days.

But beyond literal receipts, there are other elements of safeguarding your business. After all, protecting your business isn’t just about protecting it from financial and legal standpoints, although those are two important areas. You also have to think about things like your team’s productivity, employee management, healthy margins, and more. Auto shop management software is a great core tool that can help you safeguard your shop from multiple angles.

Begin Protecting Your Business With Auto Shop Management Software

One of the best tools to add to your arsenal for protecting your business is auto repair shop software.

First, a disclaimer. Auto shop management software isn’t the only tool you should rely on when it comes to protecting your business from different angles; and as such, this isn’t legal or tax advice. For example, you also need a solid understanding of your area’s laws for auto repair shops, and a good lawyer can help you navigate that. And, a CPA might be a good person to turn to when it’s time to do your taxes. The financial data from your auto shop management software makes it easier for a CPA to do their job.

Auto shop management software is one of the best ways you can gain awareness into what’s going on in your shop. With auto repair shop software, you can keep track of different parts of your business, help your team shine their brightest, impress your customers, and more. Some key areas automotive repair shop software can help you with include:

• ​Digital transactions, receipts, and records
• ​Digital inspections and estimates
• ​Repair tracking and records
• ​Employee management
• ​Centralized customer communication
• ​Estimates
• ​Parts reconciliation
• ​Healthy margins
• ​Business decisions

1. Digital Transactions, Receipts, and Records

Let’s start with arguably the most obvious way of safeguarding your business: keeping track of the transactions between your shop and customers, the receipts your shop gives customers, and the records of those completed transactions.

Taking the Phrase “Paper Trail” Too Literally: A Logistical Nightmare

Chances are, you have some form of keeping track of your customers’ transactions and giving them receipts. Perhaps you print out receipts for your customers, and also print a copy for your shop, storing it in a box somewhere behind the front desk. You might have started out with one box, but that box quickly grew to two, then three, then four… you get the picture.

You have a paper trail stuffed into multiple boxes. Service advisors might keep track of daily transactions by jotting them down on a notepad. This pen-and-paper process can quickly become disorganized.

Or, you might hand customers paper receipts (or email them their receipts as attachments), and then store digital photos of those receipts in a folder (or two, or three) on your desktop. You might even have a spreadsheet where service advisors log your shop’s daily transactions.

This is known as a partially digitized process.

It’s more organized than just sticking to pen and paper, but it can get clunky fast. Not to mention disorganized, as well. For example, a service advisor might accidentally forget to log some transaction details, and then your financial calculations will be inaccurate.

The reality is that without digital, easily-accessible receipts and transaction history, things at your shop could quickly go haywire. Here are some ways things can take a turn for the worse:

• ​A customer can claim a repair never happened. Of course, your team remembers that repair happened, but you have to dig through stacks of paper receipts to find your copy. If the receipt got lost or crumpled up to the point where it’s illegible, you won’t have evidence to disprove the customer.
• ​A customer can dispute their payment to their credit card company for a chargeback. If a service advisor forgot to log that transaction in your shop’s spreadsheet and can’t find the paper copy of the receipt, you won’t be able to make a convincing argument to defend your shop.

Without an easily accessible, digital transaction history, there’s a higher likelihood of the customer experience at your shop taking a hit. If you can’t quickly access your side of the story, it’ll be harder for you to have calm conversations with customers where you get to the bottom of things. Customers might end up feeling burned, and may not return to your shop.

A Pathway to Better Accountability

When you have digital records of transactions and receipts, you’ll be able to quickly solve problems that arise. Accountability will get a whole lot easier.

Think about it this way: the receipts you hand over to customers, and the associated copies and transaction histories you keep, are there so that if either party has a dispute after a repair has been paid for, they can reference the evidence of which repairs occurred, when those repairs occurred, and how much was paid for those repairs.

Sometimes, customers don’t voice a problem until days or even weeks after the repair has been completed. They might go home, then look over their receipt during the weekend and start questioning a line item. They call your shop the following Monday looking for an answer. If your shop has digital records that are easily accessible by looking up a customer’s profile, the service advisor who picks up the call will be able to quickly get to the heart of the issue, maximizing the chances that the customer will be happy with the interaction and will come back to your shop for future repairs.

But, let’s say your shop only has paper copies of what took place. The receipts are all stored in a box, and the record of the transaction was scribbled down in a notepad. So when the customer calls, the service advisor who picks up suddenly has to scramble through pages and pages of paper to resolve the problem. Meanwhile, the unhappy customer is getting impatient on the line, and the interaction might not end well. That’s a potential lifelong customer that your shop could lose.

2. Digital Inspection and Estimate Process

Because the inspection and estimate process is such a pivotal part of the repair process, it’s important to have a seamless, ironclad approach.

Tackling Inspections and Estimates Manually: Potential for Miscommunication

When you tackle inspections and estimates by hand, such as by having technicians write down inspection findings and repair suggestions on paper, you run a higher risk of miscommunication between your team members and between your shop and customers.

For example, if a technician’s handwriting is difficult to read, the service advisor might interpret a repair suggestion the wrong way. The customer then gets that wrong suggestion, and after the repair is complete, they might become upset that the original issue was seemingly overlooked.

Or, let’s say the technician neatly types out all of their inspection findings in an email and sends it to the service advisor, who then shares those findings with the customer. The customer emails the service advisor back about what they do and don’t want to be done on their vehicle, but there’s a typo or the service advisor misreads something. The result is the same as in the first scenario—an unhappy customer.

A Smoother Inspection and Estimate Process

The right auto shop management software helps shops run accurate, easy-to-understand inspections and estimates, minimizing the chances of miscommunication by putting more control in customers’ hands.

Specifically, technicians can take out a tablet or phone to put the inspection together, adding more nuanced details. The service advisors then get those inspection results and can send customers crystal-clear inspection reports and estimates, where everything is completely spelled out, including the severity of each proposed repair.

3. Repair Tracking and Records: Team Collaboration

Once the customer has given their authorization for repair work, it’s time for your team to start tackling the repair. There’s a lot your team has to keep track of during each repair to ensure that everything goes smoothly and the customer gets their vehicle back on time and in good shape. And after the repair work has finished, it’s a good idea to have a record of the repair work that was completed in case you need to reference it in the future.

Manually Keeping Track of Repairs: Too Many Moving Parts

Currently, your shop might be manually keeping track of repairs. Maybe your technicians and service advisors write down repair updates on a whiteboard throughout the day. Or, maybe service advisors periodically call technicians to get repair updates. Both of these methods can quickly become complicated.

If your team uses a whiteboard, the biggest problem is that they repeatedly have to get up from their work area to write down updates. If service advisors are periodically calling technicians, both are getting disrupted from the task at hand longer than necessary. In both scenarios, your technicians and service advisors are experiencing more barriers to creating and staying in a flow state. It’s hard to return back to a task when you’re consistently interrupted by someone else, or by having to do something else.

And that doesn’t even get into the problems that come up with keeping records. If the whiteboard gets erased at the end of each day, or if there’s no record of what the service advisor told the technician, how will you be able to review what happened if a customer complains, or if one of your team members needs to review an old repair order?

The right auto shop management software solves these problems by giving your team an easy way to keep each other in the loop, and for your shop to store repair records.

Creating a Flow State for Your Team

With the right auto shop management software—meaning, a solution that has the necessary repairs management workflow tools—your team can work with less interruptions, and your shop can keep better track of repair histories.

Specifically, you want to find an auto repair shop software solution that has repair workflow boards for your service advisors and your technicians. The repair workflow boards will show both sides of your team exactly where in the repair process each vehicle is. So, instead of dialing a technician or leaving their work stations to check a whiteboard or ask a technician in person, service advisors can glance at the workflow board and see how each repair is humming along. As for the technicians, they can run a time clock, update the status of the repair order, and add repair notes as they go along, without having to leave their work areas. As the timer runs and technicians mark jobs as complete, the blue progress bar in each repair order card on the Job Board moves forward and the percentage rises, showing the service advisors how far along a job is in real time.

In addition to safeguarding your team members from miscommunicating between themselves and customers, these workflow tools enhance communication and collaboration, closing the communication gaps that can spell long-term disaster for your business. For example, a service advisor is less likely to miss a critical repair update that they were supposed to communicate to a customer—a critical repair update that could make a customer upset if they weren’t informed and found out about after driving down the road from your shop.

And after repairs are completed, the auto shop management software will store that repair history for future reference. So, if a customer carries out a chargeback on a repair or claims something never happened, you can pull up the repair history to make your case.

4. Employee Management

Think back to one of your old jobs. Perhaps you used to be a technician at a dealership, but you saw the light and opened up your own shop. If you worked at a dealership, you likely saw that some of their employee management processes were valuable.

For example, as a dealership technician, you might have had annual performance reviews or received promotions based on your work quality and productivity. These were all forms of employee management the dealership was implementing. Now, some of these management techniques might have been effective, and some of them might have seemed like micromanaging, and were the reason you decided to start your own shop. While some management styles might actually weigh your team down, it’s important to find effective, positive ways to reinforce best practices at your shop so that you can have a highly effective team.

Helping Employees Shine Their Brightest

How do you keep track of your team’s productivity?

We’re not advocating micromanaging your team. But, it’s good to have insights into how efficient different members of your team are. Monitoring productivity can help you see if there’s one technician doing the most work (prompting you to ask your service advisors to spread out the work better), if there’s a service advisor making the most sales (prompting you to pair up new service advisors with that sales extraordinaire for training), and more.

Of course, there’s also the less happy side of employee management. As much as we like to imagine that we live in a perfect world where every employee gets along, you might hire someone and things might take a downturn. Maybe the employee ends up slacking off at work, or is just isn’t cooperating with the rest of the team. Or, maybe one of your employees has developed bad habits due to a lack of oversight, resulting in declined productivity that’s cutting into your revenue goals (bad habits, even if they seem small at first, add up over time). When you hire, you want to screen for competent people who will add value, and it’s a frustrating situation to be in when reality ends up not lining up with your expectations.

There are many factors that go into good employee management, like having empathy, clearly communicating expectations, and demonstrating good leadership. So, not every form of employee management comes down to using auto shop management software, but auto shop management software can streamline how you evaluate, manage, and train your employees. Auto shop management software can also help provide another layer of protection to your shop if you run into difficult situations with your team.

Without employee management tools, it’ll be harder for you to gain a clear view into your employees’ productivity and activity.

For example, you might have to pull out a calculator and manually determine how many sales each service advisor has made in a given month. Or, you might have to get your technicians to clock in and out of repairs on their own, then type that data in a word processor. That’s a lot of extra steps!

These time-consuming processes aren’t the only issue, either. You or a team member might mistype or miscalculate something. And it might be tougher for you to gain an understanding of how your employees are progressing over time, for the purposes of training, promoting, and—as a last resort—firing.

A Simpler Approach to Employee Management

With automotive repair shop software, you can gain valuable data into how your employees are doing at the shop. With that data, it’ll be easier for you to find opportunities for encouragement and constructive criticism. You can train your employees who need some extra help, create a “service advisor of the month” program to motivate service advisors to make more sales, pair up less efficient technicians with senior technicians to help them speed up, give bonuses to the highest performers, and more.

Let’s say you want to revamp the commission program you have for service advisors. You may want to bump up the commission by a certain percentage for service advisors who make sales above a certain threshold in a given time period.

Having searchable commission reporting and easy-to-use digital records of the sales your service advisors have made in a given time range will make it easier for you to hand out those sweet commissions. If a service advisor tells you they didn’t get their commission, you can quickly go and check the system and see that they didn’t meet the requirements that particular month. Showing them the hard evidence makes for easier, more understanding conversations.

Here’s a distressing example. First, we know this is a last-ditch thing to do. Finding new talent is hard, especially given the current technician shortage in the United States. That’s why we advocate you do everything you can to help your employees succeed before even considering letting them go due to poor performance.

But let’s say you’ve tried everything to help one of your technicians. You’ve repeatedly sat down with them to see how you can help, paired them with a senior technician for mentorship, given them extra training, etc. But, their efficiency hasn’t improved over a long span of time, and it’s impacting the rest of your team.

If you have a clear record of that technician’s declining productivity within your auto shop management system, you’ll be better able to make the case that you terminated them for the cause of poor performance. Having this digital record isn’t a guarantee that you will win any potential legal battles a former employee might spring on you, but it is good evidence to have in your arsenal. We hope that this never happens, but sometimes, things can take a turn for the worse, and it’s good to be as prepared as possible.