Role-based visibility means each person in your shop sees the numbers and screens their job actually requires, and not the ones it doesn’t. A technician sees their job queue, their assignments, and their hours. A service advisor sees the estimates, inspections, and customers in front of them today. A store manager sees one whole shop. An owner sees the whole portfolio.
Most multi-location operators get this half right. They are careful about what people can do and less careful about what people can see.
Visibility is not the same as permission
Permissions answer a question about authority: who can apply a discount, who can unpost a repair order, who can change a labor rate. That is worth getting right, and it gets harder with every location you add.
Visibility answers something different: whose attention is this number worth?
You can get every permission toggle exactly right and still hand all four roles the same crowded screen. Nobody's data is at risk in that setup, but everybody's attention and time is at stake.
One test that sorts almost every case
Ask this about any number, report, or screen: can this person affect the outcome and improve the bottom line?
If yes, they should see it daily, and without having to ask anyone for it. If not, showing it does not create accountability. It creates noise, and eventually the habit of ignoring the screen altogether. A technician staring at portfolio gross profit is not empowered. They are distracted from the numbers they own.
Run that test role by role to discover whether your employees have the right information in front of them.
What each role needs to see
Technicians
Needs: their job queue and assignments, hours logged against each job compared with the labor guide, parts status on jobs they are about to start, and the inspection findings they documented.
Doesn't need: portfolio revenue, shop-level gross profit, and another technician's hours or pay.
A technician's ability to make an impact on the shop's bottom line is entirely on the car in front of them. Hours and parts availability are the two things they control, and parts is the one operators most often overlook — a technician who can't see whether a part is on the shelf starts jobs they can't finish.
"It's also great to be able to see approved work and hours, and it helps us keep track of our hours efficiently."
-Anecia Lewis, Tekmetric G2 review
Service advisors
Needs: the full job board for today, inspection results the moment the technician finishes them, complete customer history including declined work, and their own close ratio.
Doesn't need: other locations' performance, portfolio-level financials, and payroll.
Close ratio is the one to sit with. It is the number advisors most directly control, and the one most of them have never been shown. An advisor who doesn't know their own close ratio has no way to tell a slow week from a presentation problem.
Advisors also need one view that reaches past their own role: the technician job board. Not to manage technicians, but to route work.
"Another feature I value is the ability to view the job board for technicians, which lets me plan more effectively and assign vehicles to technicians who could use additional hours."
-Verified service advisor, Tekmetric G2 review
Store managers
Needs: their shop, completely, including car count, ARO, close ratio by advisor, technician efficiency, work-in-progress aging, discounts applied, and end-of-day reconciliation.
Doesn't need: the other locations, unless comparing locations is genuinely part of the job.
This is the one most operators get backwards. Portfolio visibility feels like a gesture of trust, and it quietly changes the conversation: a manager judged on one shop who can see five shops will start explaining their own numbers by pointing at somebody else's. Give a manager the shop they are accountable for, and the discussion stays on their side of the desk.
Multi-location owners and ops leaders
Needs: the spread. Every location side by side on the same metrics, with the ability to drill into one shop, one advisor, or one date range when something looks off.
Doesn't need: individual repair orders, most days.
The temptation at this level is to use full access to go back to running a shop. Owners should assess the gap between their best location and the worst one — a rising portfolio average can hide one store sliding backward.
Owners who have done this describe the payoff in ordinary terms:
"Everything is online — I can work from home or at any of the terminals at any shop. I am able to set up different levels of access depending on the employee's position."
-Verified multi-shop owner, Tekmetric G2 review
Both ways to get it wrong
Too much visibility costs you attention and, at the edges, discretion. Picture a technician scrolling past their own approved hours to reach a portfolio gross profit figure they can't act on, next to payroll data they were never meant to see. A screen that should have taken four seconds to read took 40, and the habit of skimming past it starts that day.
Too little costs you speed, and it costs more than operators expect. Advisors wait on approvals for information they should already have. Managers can't make a call on their own shop without phoning the owner. And technicians start work they cannot finish:
"Technicians can simply see if all parts are now in inventory or if we are waiting on them, keeping them from wasting time starting a job we're not ready for."
-George, verified user, Tekmetric G2 review
How Tekmetric scopes visibility by role
Tekmetric is an all-in-one auto repair platform, allowing multi-shop auto repair operators to configure role and visibility together rather than as two separate projects.
New employees start from a default role — owner, manager, service advisor, or technician — each with granular permissions you can adjust, set up once and applied consistently at every location. Technicians see their job queue, their assignments, and their hours. Advisors build estimates, communicate with customers in front of them, and take payment. Managers get what they need to run their shop without touching another location's data. Owners see the full portfolio in real time from a single login.
The Job Board is where the advisor's view lives, sorting active work into estimates, work-in-progress, and completed. The Tech Board gives advisors and managers a live read on every job by technician, with status and labor hours, while technicians update status from their own device instead of walking to the front desk.
At the portfolio level, one dashboard carries ARO, car count, close ratio, gross profit, and technician efficiency for every location, filterable by shop, advisor, and date range. That filtering is what makes the same dashboard work for two different jobs: the portfolio view for an owner, one store for the person running it.
"The amount of information that is available to the front desk, the service advisor, and the technician at a glance is very impressive, and the functionality of it together is great."
-Moises M., guest service representative, Tekmetric G2 review
The takeaways
Getting this right is unglamorous configuration work that pays out as speed. Here are three things to do with it:
- Run the test on every role you have. For each number on their screen, ask whether that person can change it.
- Give each role their own scope by default. Don't overload roles with information or data. Provide what they need and can impact.
- Show your advisors their close ratio and your technicians their hours. Those are the two role-level numbers with the most direct line to ARO, and they are the two most often left switched off.
Then get out of the way and let each person look at the thing they can actually fix.
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