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Auto repair shops might bulk order carbon copies, or you might find a template online and print as many copies as your shop needs. Or, if your shop uses digital templates, you might have to deal with time-consuming digital file management.

Filling out the forms over and over, be it by handwriting or typing, can become tedious. And both options are less than ideal for record-keeping.

Paper can get lost, and digital files can become overwritten or corrupted. Both approaches are inconvenient and ultimately slow things down at your shop. And the impression you give during the payment process can determine whether those customers return or not.

Here are four reasons why a shop management system is better than an auto repair invoice template approach for your business.

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By streamlining your auto repair shop workflow, you can help your shop create a memorable customer experience that will keep them coming back next time they have a problem.

From the moment customers walk in the door to when they pick up their vehicle, your shop’s service advisors play a crucial role in creating a smooth, enjoyable experience.

Shop management software makes it easy to establish a standardized intake process so that shops can provide the same level of care to their customers every single time.

Service advisors can build repair orders in seconds, apply the right digital vehicle inspection templates with just a few clicks, and quickly text or email the results to the customer for approval.

This frees up their time to focus on the customer directly, address their concerns, and create a stress-free experience. If things go well the first time, and customers feel like they can trust your shop's recommendations, work they'll more than likely come back for future repairs.

There are many reasons you might want to sell your auto repair shop.

You might be ready for another venture; you might be trying to fund your retirement; or you might just be curious about the value of your business if you do decide to sell. 

Whether you're actively in the market to sell your shop, or you just want to know how to value an automotive repair shop just in case, you’ve come to the right place.

How to value your auto repair shop

The industry standard for establishing a sale price for an automotive repair business is to use total owner benefit (TOB) multiplied by four (or TOBx4).

So, if you took home an average of $50,000 a year for the past three years, the price of your business will likely be valued around $200,000. Keep in mind this TOB value does not include property value.

For those who are reading this with the hopes of selling in the near future, that valuation method might seem low to you. And it is.

The good news is that you can go above and beyond the industry standard, and sell your shop for a higher value, if you stay on top of your numbers.

Not only will diligent reporting and good customer service increase your TOB, but you’ll also have more leverage when negotiating offers from buyers.

Here are three steps you can take to improve the valuation of your business and secure the money that you worked hard to earn. 

It’s easy for most auto shops, myself included, to mimic what other shops are doing. Asking other shop owners questions like, "Hey, how do you do this?" or “What do your customers like?”

I definitely started off that route, and although we were growing, it was a slow growth.

When I began implementing newer, more modern strategies, my shop’s growth really took off. I first implemented a digital vehicle inspection (DVI) system with Tekmetric when I had about four team members in 2017. We were doing about 100 cars a month.

It was an adjustment. There were a couple of things I had a hard time with at the beginning. Essentially, I tried to run our shop’s physical systems—like our whiteboard—the exact same way as the DVI software.

What I didn’t realize was I needed to make two changes. One being that I needed to make the full switch to the new, modern-day auto repair shop software. The second being that I needed to adapt our physical systems to the software’s programs, or completely move them from physical to digital.

Once we did the full switch to the auto repair shop software, we were ready to rock n’ roll.

Racing-crew-chief-turned-shop-owner Mark Darragh knows exotic vehicles. From his days at the Indianapolis 500 to his decades running an exotic vehicle repair shop, he has become a go-to resource for examining some of the world's finest cars. 

Buckle up for some of Mark’s timeless insights into how to break away from the pack and put your auto repair shop in the fast lane.

Maintaining an efficient workflow is crucial to the success of any auto repair shop. A breakdown in workflow can lead to delays, a frustrated team, and unsatisfied customers. One key area where workflow can break down is during the inspection and estimate process. 

By investing in a more modern, cloud-based shop management system, you can establish a transparent, replicable digital vehicle inspection and repair estimate process, and streamline parts ordering so that service advisors can dispatch repair orders quickly to technicians. 

Parts management is a critical function of any auto repair shop business. The only way to guarantee that you’re making a profit on the parts you sell on repair orders is by having an air-tight system for managing and tracking those parts from purchase to sale to reconciliation. The final step of making sure that each and every parts transaction is accounted for is probably the most important step—and the most misunderstood.

Some of the issues your auto repair shop will run into if you don’t carefully manage parts include:

• Un-billed parts (forgetting to collect payment on parts)
• Inconsistencies between your cost of goods sold and accounts payable
• Inability to track and receive return credits
• Inability to detect theft before it gets out of hand
  

Many of these issues can be avoided by using purchase orders to reconcile the parts you sell on repair orders.

But many auto repair shop business owners still wonder what some of the best practices are when it comes to parts management. How often should you be reconciling parts payments? Who should take on this task: you, your service advisors, or a dedicated parts manager? How do you make sure you’re getting the best value for the parts you buy and sell? How do you ensure that each and every part is being billed?

Let’s answer some of these questions, and unpack the best practices for parts management.

Inventory can include items like oil, tools, and large equipment. It also includes stock items, or parts which are sold to the customer during the course of repairs, such as gaskets and timing belts.

Inventory management and parts management go hand in hand, but outside of labor profits, the profit a shop brings in ultimately comes from parts markup at the point of sale. Consequently, there’s very little room for error in managing parts.

Simply put, mismanaged parts means money left on the table and unhappy customers—a combination no shop owner or automotive team wants to experience.

A good auto parts inventory management system should let you:

• Know what parts you have in stock and how many you have

• Track what sells and what sits on the shelf longer than it should

• Help you plan for growth.

With the right auto parts inventory management system, your shop can go from disorganized to a well-oiled machine generating more and more profit.

These methods can get complicated and ineffective pretty quickly. For one, they’re prone to mistakes—what if, for example, a technician forgets to scribble down the latest status of a repair on the whiteboard?

If that happens, a service advisor might not realize things are moving ahead of schedule and might turn down a walk-in customer.

These methods also take up a lot of time. If you circle around the shop for updates throughout the day, for example, that’s time you could instead use to ramp up your shop’s marketing efforts or grow your business.

Why You Want Mechanic Repair Scheduling Software

With automotive repair scheduling software, you and your team gain more control over your shop’s time.

Instead of painstakingly getting disparate updates from around the shop, you all can check the status of each repair from any device connected to the internet.

Another advantage of automotive repair scheduling software is that your team will make fewer mistakes when it comes to giving customers status updates about their vehicles.

Before contacting a customer, a service advisor can check the system to have a more accurate estimate of how much time is left on their repair.

A capable mechanic scheduling software creates a streamlined process that ultimately leads to faster turnaround times, and, as a result, fewer missed opportunities. Going one step further and introducing online scheduling even helps provide a more modern customer experience.

Technicians and service advisors won’t have to go back-and-forth giving each other updates; they can efficiently move through each repair, opening up the shop’s schedule to take in more repairs.

And the more cars your shop can take in, the higher your shop’s Car Count and profit potential.

When customers walk into your auto repair shop, they’re trusting you and your team with the health of their vehicle, one of their most expensive assets.

They’re coming in with a problem or set of problems and expect your team to effectively fix those problems in a reasonable time frame.

And modern expectations for customer service have shifted as our technology has evolved. Customers don't want to have to find time for a phone call when they can just get texted updates about their repairs, and digital tools make it easier for shops to build transparency in their process.

Modern auto repair shop software not only makes it easy but lays the foundation for a modern customer experience at every step.

Offering a Modern Auto Repair Shop Customer Experience Starts with a Modern Shop Management System

We're big advocates of modernizing your auto repair shop, and we don't necessarily mean replacing all your racks, updating all your compressors, and swapping out your alignment rack. Sure those might help, but we get those can be really big investments.

That's why we're focused on the behind-the-scenes operations of your shop, the overall management and flow of repair orders. Modern shop management software enables owners, managers, service advisors, and technicians to gain visibility into, and control over, their individual part of the process with specific functions:

• Cloud-based shop management
• Real-time control
• Digital Vehicle Inspections
• Built-In Payment Processing
• Digital Shop Communications
• Efficient Parts and Inventory Management

While all of these directly work to modernize your shop operations, they also work to modernize your shop experience for customers.

When your shop is using Digital Vehicle Inspections instead of paper printouts, you're not only making it easier for your technicians and service advisors to communicate and collaborate, but you're also modernizing how your shop interacts with customers, by emailing or texting results and approval requests.

Running any business is an art and a science. There are tons of daily and long-term decisions you have to make to continue growing your business.  

As a shop owner, you have to make sure your employees and customers are happy, that repairs are efficiently getting through the door, and that your shop is profitable.

The Art of Running Your Business

Intuition and emotional intelligence are what make up the art of running your shop.

Your intuition will steer the split-second decisions you make when it comes to things like helping technicians work through a challenge, answering customer questions, exploring business opportunities, and networking with partners. Intuition can be a good thing—after all, it’s the culmination of the experiences you’ve had before. For example, the bad gut feeling you get about a potential business partner can save you from a world of frustration.

Your emotional intelligence is also a crucial part of running your business. As a leader, you have to be there for your team, which means knowing when someone is having an emotionally off day so you can help them work through the situation. Your emotional intelligence is a guiding compass for your team's emotional responses to each other and to customers.

Some days, you or your service advisors will run into customer challenges. Your service advisors will follow your lead, so if you use your emotional intelligence and show empathy and understanding when a customer is having a bad day, that positive example will rub off on your entire team. Your service advisors will show patience and grace in similar situations.

However, while intuition and emotional intelligence are valuable, you can’t rely on them alone. You also need to test your business decisions—your business “hypotheses,” if you will—with data so you can know whether or not you’re on the right path.

Navigating the estimate and repair process starts with an automotive repair order form. And a manual process may create more work for your team. Your service advisors are trying to move everything along quickly and accurately, but they're human and mistakes do happen.

With a manual automotive repair order form process, it can be easy for service advisors to get lost in the hustle due to typos, illegible handwriting, or estimates saved in the wrong place.

You might also find that it’s difficult to guide your business with a manual estimate and repair order process because data collection can become an enormous challenge.

Using traditional automotive repair order forms is kind of like trying to navigate a road trip with a paper map: it can be easy to get lost in the process, and once you’re lost, it can be difficult to get back on track. Nowadays, paper maps are just one of our endless choices for navigation tools, and how many drivers still use them?