Four Ways to Maximize Cash Flow in Your Shop: Deep Dive into the Numbers

Integrated payments help auto repair shops get paid faster by removing the steps between finishing a repair and collecting the money for it. When payments run inside the same platform as the repair order, the customer can pay from their phone the minute the work is done, the invoice closes itself out, and the day's totals reconcile without anyone rekeying a number.

What integrated payments actually means

Integrated payments means the payment function is built into your shop management platform rather than bolted on beside it. The repair order total flows straight to the terminal or the payment link. The payment posts back to that repair order. Refunds, disputes and deposits are handled in the same place you wrote the estimate.

A standalone processor works differently. Your advisor reads the total off one screen and types it into another. The two systems do not know about each other, so anything that connects them — the batch report, the deposit, the customer's payment history — has to be connected by a person.

That distinction sounds like a technicality. In a shop doing 20 cars a day, it is the difference between closing out at 5:15 p.m. versus 6:30 p.m.

Why the processing rate is the wrong place to start

Ask most owners what they pay to accept a card and they can tell you. Ask them how many days pass between a repair being authorized and the money landing, and it gets quiet.

Rate is worth negotiating. On high-ticket work it genuinely adds up, and any shop processing real volume should know whether they are on flat-rate or interchange-plus pricing and what that means for a $1,200 ticket. 

But rate is a percentage of money you have already collected. It does nothing about the money you have not collected yet. Cash flow is tight in this business — the average auto shop carries roughly seven days of cash on hand. At that margin, a week of delays costs more than a fraction of a percent ever will.

So start with the days, not the basis points for accepting cards and digital payments. 

The three places cash gets stuck

In almost every shop, delayed payment traces back to one of three bottlenecks.

1. The customer is not standing at your counter.

The work is done and approved. The customer is at their own job until 6 p.m. Someone has to be at the shop when they arrive, or the car sits overnight and the invoice sits with it.

Text-to-Pay solves this by sending the invoice as a secure link the moment the repair is finished. The customer opens it on their phone, reviews what was done, and pays. Because the invoice generates from the repair order, the advisor is not writing it up first. And because the payment posts back automatically, nobody has to remember to mark it paid.

Ron Rettig of Rettig Automotive Repair put it this way: "With Tekmetric Payments, my customers are paying online before I even finish the job.”

2. The repair costs more than the customer has today.

This is the expensive bottleneck, and it is not a payment problem. It looks like a declined estimate. A $2,400 job becomes a $700 job because that is what fits the customer’s budget this month, and the vehicle goes back on the road with the rest of the work unrepaired.

Buy Now, Pay Later changes the question from "can you cover this today?" to "can you cover this over a few months?" Tekmetric Payments includes Affirm, Klarna and Sunbit at checkout, and when Affirm and Sunbit are enabled, customers can pre-qualify inside the estimate link before they approve anything. The shop is paid on the transaction as normal. The customer carries the payment plan.

The effect on ticket size is not small. Shops that spread payments this way see up to three times higher ARO because customers say yes to the full recommendation instead of picking the cheapest line item on it.

Josh Anderson of Ideal Automotive on why financing mattered to them: "What really sold us on Tekmetric Payments was having financing built directly into our workflow. Our advisors can see everything in one place, and we can finally offer customers fair-term financing."

3. The day does not close cleanly.

The third bottleneck is not about collecting at all. It is about knowing what you collected. When payments live in a separate system, someone spends the end of the month cross-referencing batch reports against repair orders, hunting for the reason the bank deposit and the shop's sales record disagree by $340.

Usually the reason is a typo. An advisor keyed $1,050 as $150 on a busy Friday. With an integrated flow there is no keying, so there is no typo, and reconciliation runs in the background.

Jessica Butterfield at J&B Auto Service described what that gave back: "At the end of every month I go through and reconcile and Tekmetric has taken my process from hours down to just one hour." 

What to look for when you evaluate integrated payments

If you are weighing a move, these are the questions that separate real integration from a terminal sitting next to your computer.

• Does the repair order total reach the terminal without anyone typing it? If not, you still own the error rate.
• Does a completed payment close out the repair order on its own? Manual status updates are where invoices get lost.
• Can you send a payment link by text and take a card on file for the next visit?
• Is financing available at the estimate, not just at checkout? Pre-qualification before approval is what protects the bigger job.
• How fast is funding, and how fast is setup? Tekmetric Payments offers same-day setup and next-day funding.
• Are refunds, disputes and deposits handled in one place, or does each one mean calling a second vendor?
• Does reconciliation happen automatically, or does it happen on someone's Sunday?

Andrew Klement at Finley River Auto & Diesel summed up the integration case in a sentence: "All in one place. All integrated. One support number to call when there's an issue."

What getting paid faster changes in your numbers

Faster payment is not a soft benefit. It moves things you already measure.

Turnaround time from check-in to payment gets shorter because the last step in the repair order stops waiting on a person's schedule. Average repair order goes up when financing is available at the moment the customer is deciding, rather than after they have already trimmed the estimate. And customer satisfaction improves for a reason that has nothing to do with payments technology: nobody enjoys standing at a counter after a $1,400 repair bill. Paying from the couch is simply a better end to the visit.

Negotiate your rate. It is real money. Then go look at the three bottlenecks, because that is where the larger number is hiding. Integrated payments shorten the distance between finishing a repair and being paid for it.

Prasanth Chilukuri understands the challenges that shop owners face each day with gaps in their efficiency and margins, which is why he co-founded Tekmetric with Sunil Patel in 2016.

Vehicle Service Pros published some of Prasanth’s tips for strategically growing an auto repair business with a shop management system like Tekmetric.

You can access his full piece here, or check out some of the highlights below.

Balance Is Key to Making Better-Informed Business Decisions

Shop owners make countless daily decisions that affect their customers, their team, and their business.

Making good business decisions is essential to keeping everyone happy and keeping the lights on in the shop, but how do you know what the right decision is?

According to Prasanth, the key to any successful business is finding the right balance between soft skills like intuition or relationship-building and hard skills like data analysis.

Both types of skills are important, but knowing when to employ each one is the trick to making better-informed decisions and growing your business.

Intuition is useful when shop owners have to make split-second decisions and often goes hand in hand with interpersonal skills. The auto repair industry isn’t just about cars, after all; it’s about people, too.

By learning how to pick up on cues and anticipate the needs of customers, employees, and vendors, shop owners can foster long-lasting relationships that grow alongside their business.

Of course, there’s only one way to know whether your shop is truly turning a profit: look at the numbers and analyze the results. Data can support any hunches you have about the health of your business, for better or for worse, so you can plan accordingly.

But if your shop is still tied to manual methods, gathering key information about parts usage and labor costs is probably not easy or convenient.

Why Manual Methods Just Can’t Keep Up

A shop management system might not be able to make business decisions for you, but it can help shop owners make sense of their key metrics and data. According to Prasanth, looking at the cold, hard facts is essential to boost the efficiency and profitability of the shop.

The science of data might seem contrary to the art of intuition at first, but they’re more related than you might think. As Prasanth describes, data can add support to a shop owner’s intuition or observations and reveal key information that can’t necessarily be gathered from conversations with customers and employees.

Unfortunately, trying to sort through the shop’s data by hand can be exhausting and often means missing family dinners to crunch the numbers after hours. And manually calculating daily, weekly, or monthly metrics can quickly become a headache with much larger room for human error.

Without real-time reporting tools, inventory counts and gross profit can’t necessarily be trusted and will always provide an out-of-date view of your business at best.

Being tied to manual processes for data collection also means being tied to the shop and losing out on valuable face-to-face time with the customers supporting the business.

As a result, shop owners are often left making the difficult decision between nurturing their intuition and building relationships, or focusing on the data and shop profitability when both are essential to the long-term success of the business. With Tekmetric, you can do both.

Get the Full Picture With Tekmetric

Tekmetric is a shop management system that comes fully equipped with business reporting tools within a repair orders software suite.

Tekmetric tracks key performance indicators like employee efficiency, parts usage, and profitability ‘round the clock so shop owners can focus on the more high-level aspects of their business.

Real-time reports are always available with numbers that are already calculated and organized.

A bird’s eye view of the shop gives shop owners the power to tailor their business plan and strategy by:

• Adjusting parts and labor matrices to maximize margins
• Extending or removing a running promotion
• Deciding to add more people to the team
• Knowing when it’s the right time to expand the business with new bays or by opening a new location

An auto repair estimate template, otherwise commonly referred to as a car repair estimate template, can be a great communication tool for your shop—or it can leave your team spinning their wheels in the dirt.  

While it’s easy to assume that any old auto repair estimate template will lead to a faster repair order process, unfortunately, not all templates are created equal.

The most effective templates provide a standardized framework for the estimate and repair process and lay everything out for your team and customers in a digestible format. The least effective templates cause more work for your team and eat up extra time that could (and should) be spent taking care of the customers.

A Modern Approach For Your Shop

Nowadays, there’s a whole spectrum of template options to choose from, including pen and paper forms, downloadable PDFs, and full-service shop management systems with a built-in RO program.

Finding the right fit for your shop might feel like a challenge, but the effort you put into looking for an auto repair estimate template says you care a lot about your team’s time and value their autonomy.

Upgrading your estimate process helps your team maximize its potential by giving them the power to focus on what they do best—getting customers back on the road.