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

Repair estimates are the foundation for your shop’s revenue.

How you estimate work and send those findings and estimates over to your customers will shape your shop’s profitability, your customer relationships, and how professional you come across to your customers.

Some shop owners might be tempted to use the free online car repair estimator tools to run their own estimates. But will this shortcut actually help your shop get to where you want it to be?

What Is an Auto Repair Estimate?

When customers come to your shop for repair work, they’re expecting a standardized process with an estimate for all the work your shop will be completing. Typically, as you'll know, this meant paper printouts or even manually, hand-written checklists.

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But paper leaves a lot to be desired. As shop management systems have shifted from pen and paper to digital, and more recently from older digital software to modern cloud-based solutions, shops have access to way better tools than ever before.

Whereas traditional methods of payment require dipping a card in the same terminal as other customers or the hand to hand exchange of cash or check, the ability to pay by text message through SMS mobile payments takes the complexity and headaches out of the payment process for owners, service writers, and guests alike.

For auto repair shops in particular, giving guests the ability to pay by text not only streamlines the guest experience but also frees up service advisors from having to do a bunch of data entry, giving them more time to help other guests.

Here’s how text-to-pay works on our Integrated Payments, Tekmerchant. As you’ll see, we’ve built in opportunities to enhance efficiency while strengthening the relationship you have with your guests at each step of the process.

Step 1: Complete the Repair Order & Send the Invoice

By connecting Tekmerchant to Tekmetric, service advisors can quickly review the invoices of completed work and simply click a button to text the invoice to the guest.

Since the invoice is automatically generated from the repair order and is easy to edit within Tekmetric, the service advisor can reduce the time they would usually spend writing invoices.

Step 2: Collect Payment

Once the invoice is sent, the guest will receive a link that takes them directly to their invoice and pay screen. From there, they can review the work that was completed and make their payment, prompting them to input their billing information.

The customer inputs their card information, including their billing address, making it a verified payment.

At this point, all the service writer has to do is make sure that the payment has been approved and that everything checks out.

Pro Tip: Enhance Guest Service with a Call or Personal Text

Because service advisors and guests both have access to a digital invoice, it gives service advisors the opportunity to add a human touch to the payment process without the guest coming into the shop.

Consider having service advisors give guests a call or send a personal text message at this part of the process.

While this may seem like an extra step, it gives service advisors a chance to check-in with the guest to ensure all approved work was completed, which is a big step towards avoiding chargebacks.

Calling the guest is also a good chance to remind them of any maintenance that may need to be taken care of in the future and any upcoming deals or events. If the guest is too busy to take a call, Integrated Payments has a Text-to-Pay feature giving them the freedom to pay when they have time.

If everything looks good on the invoice, the guest can easily pay and move on with their day. You get paid fast and the guest is able to pay at their convenience.

Step 3: Return Vehicle to Customer

Once the payment has been processed, all that’s left to do is to return the vehicle.

Pro Tip: Add a Key Drop-Box for Convenience

Some auto repair shops use a key drop-box or locker to make vehicle returns more convenient for their guests and service advisors.

Most contactless drop boxes use programmable codes, so you can put the guest’s keys in a locker, send them the code, and let them pick up their car when they’re ready.

With a key drop-box, everyone wins: service advisors don’t have to worry about staying late; shop owners don’t have to worry about paying a service writer overtime, and your guests don’t have to feel rushed to make it back to the repair shop before closing time.

Turbo-charge Your Payments Processing

The Integrated Payment text-to-pay feature makes life easy for your guests and service advisors, and can potentially save you time, money, and headaches.

See how your shop stacks up against thousands of auto repair shops nationwide

You track your ARO. Maybe you watch your car count week over week. You know when a month is good and when it's below par.

But here's a question most shop owners can't answer quickly: Compared to shops like yours, are your numbers strong, average, or quietly underperforming?

There's a real difference between a number that's improving and a number that's competitive. A shop can grow ARO year over year and still be well below what high-performing shops are seeing in their market. Without an external reference point, you don't know which situation you're in.

That's the problem benchmarking solves, and it's the reason the data matters more than the direction.

Internal Tracking Tells You the Trend. Benchmarking Tells You the Truth.

Internal performance tracking is essential. If you don't know your ARO, car count, parts margin, and effective labor rate, you're managing without the most basic tools. But internal tracking has a structural limitation: it can only tell you how you're doing relative to your own history.

That's useful for spotting momentum — a rising ARO, a growing car count, tighter parts margin. What it can't tell you is whether your baseline is strong or weak relative to the market.

A shop with a $580 ARO that has grown from $520 over two years has made real progress. But if top-performing shops in their region are averaging significantly higher, that progress hasn't closed the competitive gap. It's just moved in the right direction.

The fix isn't to stop internal tracking. It's to add an external benchmark so you know what the target actually looks like.

➡ See how your ARO compares →

The Problem With Benchmarking From Anecdotes

Many shop owners get their benchmarks the informal way: conversations with peers at trade shows, numbers shared in coaching groups, or revenue figures posted in forums. These have real value, but they're also limited.

Self-reported numbers skew high (people share their wins). Peer groups are small samples. Industry averages from trade associations are often lagged and lack the granularity you need to compare fairly — a six-bay shop in a suburban market shouldn't be benchmarking against national averages that include dealership-adjacent shops in metro areas.

The more useful comparison is data drawn from shops operating in similar conditions, at similar scale, tracked in a consistent and anonymized way.

What Good Benchmarking Actually Looks Like

Effective benchmarking for an auto repair shop compares you on the four metrics that most directly drive profitability:

• ARO: Are you getting full value from each car that comes through your door?
• Car count: Is your volume where it needs to be to support your revenue goals?
• Parts margin: Are you protecting margin as supplier costs fluctuate?
• Effective labor rate: Is your real revenue per labor hour aligned with your posted rate?

Each of these metrics has a different lever. If your ARO is lagging, the fix usually involves inspection completion rates or customer communication. If your car count is stagnant, the issue is typically acquisition or retention. If your parts margin is eroding, your pricing matrix needs a look. If your effective labor rate is low, it's often a discounting or packaging problem.

Benchmarking tells you which problem to solve first. That's valuable when you have limited time and you're trying to prioritize.

How the Tekmetric Shop Index Works

The Tekmetric Shop Index is a free benchmarking tool built from data collected across more than 12,000 auto repair shops. Enter your shop's metrics and get an instant comparison showing where you stand on each of the four key measures. No Tekmetric account is required. Anyone can use it.

The output isn't a vague grade — it shows you where each metric ranks and gives you a clear picture of where the gap is largest. That's the signal that tells you where to focus first.

➡ Benchmark your shop now →

What to Do After You See Your Rankings

The benchmarking data is the starting point, not the finish line. Once you know which metric is your biggest gap, you can start asking the right questions:

• If ARO is lagging: How consistently are your technicians completing and sending digital vehicle inspections (DVIs)? Are customers seeing and approving the recommended work?
• If car count is flat: Are you actively pursuing new customers? Are return visit intervals optimized? Are declined jobs being followed up?
• If parts margin is soft: When did you last review your parts pricing matrix? Is it adjusting for recent cost increases from your vendors?
• If the effective labor rate is low: Are service writers building jobs accurately? Are discounts being applied consistently or inconsistently?

Each of these questions points toward a workflow, and Tekmetric's reporting is built to surface the answers at the job, technician, and service writer level. But even before you get to that step, knowing which question to ask is most of the work.

➡ Benchmark your shop now →

The Shops Getting This Right

High-performing shops don't treat benchmarking as a one-time exercise. They check their rankings periodically, track how their numbers shift against the industry baseline, and use the comparison to coach their teams with context.

"You're at 85% DVI completion" is a data point. "You're at 85% completion, and top shops are at 95%" is a coaching conversation with direction.

"Seeing them take the shift to Tekmetric and then grow profitability in the same four walls has been phenomenal. Some of them are just exponential."  — Matt Schwab, Clutch Automotive, Tekmetric Customer

Takeaways

• Internal tracking shows you direction; benchmarking shows you position.
• The four metrics — ARO, car count, parts margin, effective labor rate — are the right comparison points.
• Good benchmarking data is consistent, anonymized, and drawn from shops with similar operating profiles.
• The TSI tool is free, built from more than 12,000 shops, and gives you an instant read on where your gaps are largest.
• Your benchmark result tells you which lever to pull first — and that's where the work starts.

Once you know your gaps, the next step is building a system to close them.

➡ Benchmark your shop now →

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