Digital Vehicle Inspection Software: 7 Core Features to Look For

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April 5, 2024

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Read time: 3 min

When researching digital vehicle inspection software solutions, you should look for these seven core features that benefit your team and your customers:

  1. A searchable DVI history
  2. The ability for technicians to attach photos and videos to inspections
  3. A color-coded system that indicates the severity of inspection findings
  4. A direct tie-in to parts and labor data when building estimates
  5. The ability to add canned jobs when building estimates
  6. Digital authorization
  7. Automatic saving and tracking of declined jobs

1. Searchable DVI History

When shopping for digital vehicle inspection software, make sure that you can easily look back on past inspection findings. When service advisors are able to quickly find out what was uncovered during previous inspections, they’re less likely to miss a repair opportunity and leave money on the table. They can simply pick up where they left off, helping your shop sell more repair work.

2. The ability for technicians to attach photos and videos to inspections

It’s one thing to tell a customer, “Hey, your car has really bad engine corrosion.” It’s another thing to show the customer a photo of the orange, brittle-looking rust all over their engine. When customers can see what’s really going on with their vehicles, they’re more likely to trust your team’s word and authorize repairs right then and there. They’ll be less inclined to shop around for a second opinion or tell you, “Oh, I’ll sleep on it and come back tomorrow.”

A digital vehicle inspection software that enables technicians to quickly attach photos and videos will help your team keep repairs moving along and build customer trust.

3. A color-coded system that indicates the severity of inspection findings

When explaining repairs to customers, the best route is often the simplest one. Instead of spending time speaking or writing about the intricacies of each inspection finding, service advisors can leverage digital vehicle inspection software that uses a simple, color-coded system to instantly give customers an idea of how urgent each inspection finding is. For instance, an inspection finding marked in green would indicate that everything is good to go, one marked in yellow would indicate something that might need attention down the line, and red would indicate the need for immediate action.

4. A direct tie-in to parts and labor data when building estimates

It’s vital for service advisors to weave in the right parts and labor data when building estimates. But doing so manually is a tedious process. With everything going on, service advisors might accidentally scribble down the wrong piece of information, resulting in the customer getting the wrong parts and labor pricing, or inaccurate parts availability.

Digital vehicle inspection software with a direct tie-in to parts and labor data helps service advisors create accurate estimates from the get-go, so there are no unpleasant surprises for anyone at the shop come estimate-review time.

5. The ability to add canned jobs when building estimates

On a daily basis, service advisors may find themselves writing the same types of findings on estimates over and over.

Digital vehicle inspection software with a canned jobs feature will eliminate a lot of this repetition by enabling service advisors to add pre-saved jobs to estimates in a matter of seconds. That way they can complete inspections faster and get estimates in customers’ hands as soon as possible.

6. Digital authorization

The easier you make it for your customers to authorize repair work, the more likely they’ll quickly do so. That’s where digital vehicle inspection software with digital job authorization steps in. Service advisors won’t have to track down customers to get their verbal or written approval to start repair work. Instead, customers can approve or decline individual jobs from the moment they get their estimate.

7. Automatic saving and tracking of declined jobs

Some repair work is going to get declined for various reasons. But don’t worry. Declined jobs show that your shop is thorough with inspections and estimates; your team caught every budding and existing issue with each vehicle. Think of declined jobs as future business opportunities for your shop.

However, remembering and keeping track of declined jobs can get tricky with a pen and paper method. Service advisors might totally forget about these opportunities, or if they remember, they’ll have to dig through stacks of paper or navigate folder after folder on a computer just to find the right estimate.

Digital vehicle inspection software that has a “declined jobs” feature enables your service advisors to pick up right where they left off the next time a particular customer walks into your shop. They’ll be able to search which jobs the customer declined last time, and recommend taking care of those issues. The results? You’ll get more business and impress your customers with your great customer service.

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FAQ

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Drivers can sometimes see repairs as frivolous or not important.

Reasons for their skepticism can stem from many things: the customer can’t see what the service advisor is seeing on their end; they might not have a way to gauge the importance of the issue at hand; maybe a service advisor doesn’t communicate the problem correctly or forgets to ask the customer if they’re following along.

Tekmetric’s features empower auto repair shops to improve customer transparency, streamline communication, provide flexible payment options, and simplify the payment process.

These promote customer trust, enhance satisfaction, and ultimately help your shop close more repair orders. And that's what matters most.

Because at the end of the day, if customers feel they can trust your shop, they'll be more likely to return the next time they need something repaired.

Your Auto Repair Shop Can Close More Repairs Orders With These Features

August 20, 2024

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“If you are interested in picking up a new hobby like boating, you’ll do everything you can to learn more and more and more. Why can’t you do that with your auto repair shop?

Is it because it’s boring?

Is it because it’s not the same?

It doesn’t excite you as much as your hobby would?

If you take a second and stop to think, you’ll realize you can have any hobby in the world if you focus on your repair shop and get it to where it needs to be.

There is no waiting for the right person to walk through the door. There is no waiting for the right technician."

"It has to happen right now, today."

Tekmetric Co-CEO and Co-Founder Sunil Patel recently joined Kelsey Outram on the LIFT Your Shop Podcast to talk tech, mentorship, and transforming your auto repair business.

From medical school to law enforcement, Sunil tried his hand at a variety of fields over the years, but eventually all roads led him to founding Tekmetric with Prasanth Chilukuri in 2016.

Tekmetric quickly became the preferred shop management system in the auto repair industry.

And if you ask Sunil why, he’ll say it’s all about mindset.

If you’re a shop owner who has been feeling stuck, here are six steps you can take to shift gears.

1. Define Your Goals

“When you really set your mind to something, it subconsciously changes how you behave as a human, as a person. And you hone in on what you’re trying to accomplish and you accomplish that task.”

Here are some examples of goals you might hear people talk about in the auto repair industry:

  • “I want to make one million dollars in revenue this year."
  • “I would like to add another bay to the shop by the end of the year."
  • “I want to open another location in 2023.”

What do these goals all have in common? They are specific, achievable, and easy to track.

In the same way that it’s difficult to plan a vacation without having a travel destination in mind, it’s difficult to achieve a goal if you never set one in the first place.

Knowing where you want to go is the first step toward figuring out a roadmap to get there.

2. Accept That Change is Part of the Process

“Forget about the technology and software and all that for a moment, and ask yourself this: Are you happy with where you are today running your shop? And if the answer is no, then dig deeper.”

Whether your shop is looking to switch parts suppliers or invest in a new shop management system, change can be intimidating.

Many shops experience growing pains, but keeping an open mind is essential to driving your business forward.

Your locations don't have an ARO problem. They have a consistency issue.

If you run more than one shop, you have a number you probably don't look at often enough: the distance between your highest-ARO location and your lowest. That spread isn't a meaningless number. It's a diagnosis — and it's usually pointing at something you can fix this quarter.

Seeing one shop consistently post a higher average repair order (ARO)the average dollar amount per repair order — while another lags behind, month after month, tells you something useful and fixable — that the two shops aren't actually running the same playbook.

When identified, an ARO gap points directly at where revenue is leaking and which location can improve its bottom line. Here's how to read it, and how to close that gap.

What ARO by location actually measures

ARO is your total sales divided by your car count. On its own, a single shop's ARO tells you how much revenue you capture per vehicle. Compared across locations, ARO becomes a relative measure. It shows you which shops are upselling the customers they already have, and which ones are letting opportunities walk out the door.

That distinction matters because car count and ARO are different levers. A location can be busy and still underperform on ARO. When two of your shops see roughly the same number of vehicles but post meaningfully different ARO, the busier-but-lower shop isn't short on demand — it's short on execution somewhere between check-in and checkout.

Why the same brand produces different numbers

When you standardize on one brand, one sign, and one set of prices, you'd expect performance to converge. It usually doesn't, and the reasons tend to fall into three buckets.

1. Inspections aren't consistent

The digital vehicle inspection is where most ARO is won or lost. A location that completes thorough inspections on nearly every car — with photos and clear findings — surfaces more legitimate work and gives customers a reason to say yes. A location that treats the DVI as optional, or rushes it, never puts that work in front of the customer in the first place. Shops that consistently attach more photos and findings to their inspections tend to post a higher ARO than shops that don't, because customers can see the work rather than just hear about it.

2. Estimating and pricing drift shop to shop

If one location prices a job from an up-to-date matrix and another builds estimates by memory or old habits, you'll see the difference in ARO. The same brake job, quoted two ways, produces two different repair orders. Multiply that across every ticket, every day, at every location, and small pricing inconsistencies become a large revenue gap.

3. Workflow and presentation vary by advisor

How work gets presented — whether declined jobs are captured for follow-up, if good/better/best options are offered, and the customer sees the inspection before the phone call — all of it moves ARO. When those steps live in one advisor's head instead of in a standard workflow, they leave when that advisor does.

How to compare ARO across multiple locations

A useful ARO comparison starts with removing the excuses you can measure. Before you conclude a location is simply in a weaker market, line the shops up on the metrics that feed ARO. When you compare ARO across multiple locations, look at five things:

What to compare across locations

  • Inspection completion rate: what percentage of cars get a full digital vehicle inspection (DVI) at each location.
  • Photos and findings per inspection: whether the shop shows customers the work or just describes it to them.
  • Close ratio: of the work presented, how much the customer approves.
  • Declined jobs recovered: whether declined work is followed up over time or lost.
  • Real-time reporting: whether you can see all of the above per location, side by side, without building a spreadsheet.

Those five inputs are what separate a high-ARO location from a low-ARO one. Walk them in order, per shop:

  • Inspection completion rate — what percentage of cars actually get a full DVI at each location?
  • Photos and findings per inspection — is the low-ARO shop showing customers the work, or just telling them about it?
  • Close ratio — of the work presented, how much gets approved? A low close ratio points at presentation, not demand.
  • Declined jobs — is the shop recovering declined work over time, or letting it disappear?

When you put those side by side, the ARO gap almost always resolves into a specific, coachable behavior at a specific location — not a vague "that store just isn't as good." The lowest-ARO shop with the weakest inspection numbers is usually your single, fastest opportunity because you're not trying to create demand — you're converting cars you already have.

You can't coach a gap you can't see

The hard part for most multi-shop operators isn't knowing that consistency matters — it's seeing the gap in the first place. When each location's numbers live in a separate system, a spreadsheet, or a manager's weekly recap, the comparison is always late and never quite apples-to-apples. By the time you notice a location has slipped, you've lost a quarter.

This is where running every shop on one platform changes the math. Tekmetric gives multi-shop operators multi-location control and real-time visibility: a portfolio-wide dashboard and shop-level reporting that track revenue, ARO, car count, and technician productivity across multiple locations at once. Instead of assembling the picture after the fact, you can see which location is drifting while there's still time to coach it.

"Now I can look at everybody at a glance. I can be in a different state, different city and know exactly what's going on in each location all the time. That's not something I had before."
— Leroy Ingram, Ooroo Auto Care (MSO)

Visibility is only half of it. The same platform lets you standardize the inputs that drive ARO — DVIs, canned and Smart Jobs, pricing matrices, and discounts — across every shop, so your best location's playbook becomes every location's default rather than a secret one store happens to know.

"Seeing [a newly acquired shop] take the shift from what they've always used to Tekmetric and then grow profitability in the same four walls has been phenomenal. Some of them are just exponential."
— Matt Schwab, Clutch Automotive (MSO)

Turning the gap into a plan

Once you can see the gap and its causes, closing it is a matter of focus. A few takeaways:

  • Start with your lowest-ARO, lowest-inspection location. It's the biggest lever to pull and the fastest move to make because the demand is already there.
  • Fix one input at a time. Get DVI completion up first; inconsistent inspections are the most common root cause of a lagging ARO.
  • Make your best shop the template. Standardize its workflows, pricing, and inspection process, then apply them everywhere instead of hoping each store reinvents them.
  • Watch the gap, not just the average. A rising portfolio average can hide one location sliding backward. The spread between best and worst is the number that tells you whether your standards are actually holding.

The gaps among your best and worst shops isn't a verdict on your locations. It's a map. It shows you exactly where the next dollar of ARO is hiding.

See the gap across every location

Tekmetric gives multi-shop operators multi-location control and real-time visibility into ARO, car count, and productivity across every store — plus the standardized workflows to close the gap.

Want to see where your shops stand first? The free Tekmetric Shop Index benchmarks your ARO, car count, parts margin, and effective labor rate against thousands of shops nationwide — no account required.

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