The holiday season is now in full swing, and as a shop owner, you’re probably thinking about how to best lead your team during this time.
Between the hot chocolate and the carols, there will be a lot you’ll have to navigate, including holiday pay and time-off requests.
By preparing and leveraging auto repair shop management software, all of this can be a piece of cake (or pie, if that’s your holiday dessert of choice).
Your technicians will likely appreciate getting paid faster, especially during the holidays, when they’re probably planning for purchases like gifts and decorations.
Instead of waiting until an entire RO is completed, you can pay your technicians as they finish individual jobs.
That way, technicians won’t have to wait for their colleagues to finish their tasks. They can get their paychecks once their part of the repair is done.
Some technicians end up getting more or fewer hours than others—and not necessarily on purpose.
After all, it can be easy to lose track of who has done what recently. This holiday season can be the perfect time to start turning that around by giving more equal hours to technicians across your shop.
That way, you can avoid overworking or underworking technicians during the holiday season and beyond.
Whether or not your shop already has a vacation time policy in place, you’ll likely see a lot of time off requests during the holidays. Your team members might want to take extra time off outside of the designated days the entire shop will be closed for the holidays.
As much as you want to honor everyone’s time-off requests, it’s not realistic. If you have too many people out at the same time, you risk being understaffed, which can lead to slowdowns and frustrated customers.
Instead of risking being understaffed, you can implement a fair time off system and communicate it to your staff. For instance, you can stipulate that time-off requests during the holiday will be “first come, first serve.”
You could even stagger the schedule so that if multiple people want to be off on the same day, the first half could work during the morning and the second half could take over in the afternoon.
If you do want your shop to be partially staffed on, say, Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve in case of any emergency vehicle repairs, you can offer your staff holiday pay.
This way, team members who would like the extra money can opt to work those days, rather than you designating certain people to come to work.
During the holidays, your shop might spend time giving back to the community, be it through organizing a holiday donation drive or giving discounts to essential workers. As a shop owner, you might also be thinking about how you can spread some holiday cheer to your team.
A great way to do so is by giving everyone a holiday bonus. However, you need to evaluate if you’re in a financial position to give out holiday bonuses, and if so, how much you can give each person.
Selecting the right business name for your auto repair shop can be a challenging task. Your business name will be the first impression your potential customers have of your shop and will determine how memorable your shop will be. Use the ideas below to brainstorm the perfect name for your auto repair business.
Once you have your list of potential shop names narrowed down, it is time to do a final round of research to make sure your name is legal, optimized and ready to launch. Check out our final 6 tips and tricks below.
Before you can launch your new automotive shop name, you should check for Trademarks by visiting the US Patent and Trademark Website. Simply search your pending business name to see if it is taken or if you can proceed.
Search engine optimization for auto repair shops is an important avenue for driving brand awareness and new customers. To maximize your new business name, aim to include common keywords like “automotive”, “repair”, and “shop”. Also, try to use local terms like “Houston” to help search engines know where your services are located. Lastly, check to see if any competitors are using a similar name and determine if your name will be unique enough.
GoDaddy can check if your new automotive repair shop name is available to use. You will also be able to see how much the domain name will cost and whether it would be cheaper to use a variation of your business name.
Keeping your new shop name simple will help you in the long run. Potential customers will find it easier to remember (and share via word of mouth) if you keep it short and simple. Plus, shorter business names are easier to fit on business cards, advertisements, and social media.
Looking down the road, your new business name should fit within your overall automotive marketing strategy. Are you planning to use a certain logo or color scheme? Make sure your name fits the theme you are aiming for and attracts your target audience. If you plan to use social media marketing, check to see if your business name is available as a social handle.
Your name is likely your first impression with your customers. Once you are ready to launch, give it one more review to make sure it conveys the right brand identity and message. Lastly, have a friend or colleague offer feedback on your business name and see how it resonates with them.
Tekmetric has developed a free AI-powered mechanic shop name generator tool to help you brainstorm new business name ideas. Our tool can also help you check for domain availability and provide logo design concepts.
Finding the right name for your business is a daunting task and we hope this guide has helped you brainstorm new business name ideas and narrow down your list. We recommend taking the extra time to make the right choice up front so you don’t have to rebrand down the road. As always, there is wisdom to asking for feedback from your community. Select your top 5 names and ask for help picking the best shop name for your business.
Let’s face it, tracking inventory is tricky. It takes keen attention to detail, an ability to anticipate your shop’s needs, great timing, and some serious research skills—not to mention a lot of time on the phone or computer, away from the action of the shop.
Bottom line? Keeping track of inventory is a job that most service advisors and shop owners didn’t sign up for. While some shops have a shop foreman to help with inventory, even the best foreman still needs a solid tracking system.
But when a shop runs low on the right tools and parts, it can mean turning away customers when you could be building loyalty instead. Simply put, without up-to-date inventory records, your shop may have to pump the brakes and turn away customers or delay jobs.
If your team wants to stay ahead in the industry, you probably see inventory upkeep as a frequent task. And without a shop inventory software, you might also spend hours calculating purchases, tracking orders, checking wear and tear to tools, and rotating stock.
Everyone has their own way of conducting the inventory process, but in general, inventory methods fall into three major categories:
If you’re still using pen and paper or a spreadsheet, it may be time to upgrade or at least supplement your inventory process.
The most important features in auto repair shop management software are the ones that connect your business end-to-end: repair orders and estimates, digital vehicle inspections, parts ordering and inventory, integrated payments, and real-time reporting. If a system does those five things well, and keeps them in one place instead of five, it will vastly improve how your shop runs.
The hard part isn't finding software with a long feature list. It's telling the difference between features that move the needle in your bays and features that just look good in a sales demo. This guide breaks down the categories that matter, what each one actually does for your shop, and what to look for when you compare options.
What it is: The digital repair order (RO) is the backbone of the shop management system. Estimates should build fast — pulling in labor times and parts — and flow directly into the RO without rekeying anything.
Why it matters: This is where most of your team's wasted time hides. When an estimate becomes an RO in one click, and job templates drop in common parts and labor automatically, a service advisor can build a ticket in a fraction of the time. Over a full day of ROs, that adds up.
What to look for: Pre-built job templates, labor guide integration, and a clean estimate-to-authorization path. In Tekmetric, Smart Jobs allow advisers to build ROs from templates with parts and labor already attached, and estimates flow straight into the repair order.
What it is: A digital inspection lets technicians document findings with photos and videos from a phone or tablet and send them straight to the customer.
Why it matters: Customers approve work they can see. A photo of a worn brake pad does more to earn trust — and a yes — than a line item on a paper estimate. That trust is what lifts approval rates and average repair order value, and it's why DVIs are one of the few features worth treating as non-negotiable.
What to look for: Photo and video capture, quick send-to-customer, and digital authorization built into the same flow. Tekmetric shops have reported meaningful ARO gains from strong DVI use, with ARO value rising from a $612 baseline to $741 for shops that use DVIs consistently.
What it is: Parts management covers two things: knowing what's on your shelf, and ordering what isn't — ideally without leaving the repair order.
Why it matters: Parts are where margin quietly leaks out of a shop. Wrong parts, duplicate orders, and time lost bouncing among supplier tabs all cost money. When ordering is built into the RO and inventory updates as parts are used, your team stays in one screen and your margins stay protected.
What to look for: Integrated ordering through the supplier networks you already use, real-time stock visibility, and a parts matrix to keep pricing consistent. Tekmetric connects to parts suppliers so technicians can order parts as they diagnose issues.
What it is: Payments that live inside the shop management system, so checkout, reconciliation, and reporting all run off the same data.
Why it matters: A faster checkout is a better customer experience, and integrated payments mean you're not hand-matching a separate processor's statements at the end of the day. Options like text-to-pay and financing also help customers say yes to bigger jobs.
What to look for: Card and digital wallet acceptance, Text-to-Pay, built-in reconciliation, and financing options — all reporting into one place. In Tekmetric, payments are a built-in add-on rather than bolted on. There is no separate terminal, no third-party login, and no support ticket when something does not sync. Refunds, disputes, and deposits are handled in the same platform shops use to run repair orders.
Tekmetric customers have access to all of this: Buy Now, Pay Later partners like Affirm, Klarna, and Sunbit make bigger repairs affordable for customers, and shops offering flexible consumer financing can increase average repair order value by up to three times. Add same-day setup, next-day funding, and fraud protection through Stripe Radar, and payments stop being a separate system to manage. They become one more step in a workflow shops already know.
What it is: Live visibility into the numbers that tell you how the shop is running — average repair order, car count, gross profit, technician productivity — without waiting for month-end.
Why it matters: You can't fix what you can't see. Real-time reporting is what turns a platform from a digital filing cabinet into a tool you actually run the business with. It's also the feature owners underrate at buying time and rely on most six months in.
What to look for: Key metrics on a dashboard, the ability to drill into a technician or a location, and reporting you can trust without exporting to a spreadsheet. Tekmetric surfaces these metrics in real time from the shop counter or from home.
If the platform only lives on the computer at the front counter, half its value is stuck there. Cloud-based access means you can check the shop from home, and a real mobile app keeps technicians moving without walking back and forth to a terminal.
No platform does everything, so the ones that connect cleanly to accounting, parts suppliers, and marketing tools win. Tekmetric offers more than 70 integrations so you can build the workflow around your shop instead of the other way around.
A quick lens when you're comparing options:
Get those four right and the feature checklist mostly takes care of itself. The categories above — repair orders, DVI, parts and inventory, payments, and reporting — are the ones that decide whether your shop runs faster and more profitably or just runs the same way with a nicer screen.
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