How to Get Better Results from Automotive Repair Order Forms

We’re excited to announce that Tekmetric, the leading cloud-based shop management system for automotive repair shops, is joining forces with Shopgenie, the leading auto repair shop CRM, to provide a comprehensive all-in-one solution that optimizes operations and drives growth for auto repair shops. This combination is set to combine the best of both worlds, offering shop owners smarter tools, seamless integrations, and enhanced features to optimize operations and drive growth—all from a single, unified platform.

So, what does it mean for our partner shops? Here’s a few of the benefits you’ll see in the coming months: 

• Streamline your operations: Managing your shop requires balancing internal processes while delivering top-notch customer service. With the addition of Shopgenie, we’re not just expanding our platform—we’re creating a true all-in-one solution that addresses the real-world challenges you face every day. Soon, you’ll have one platform, one login, and one phone number for all customer communication, simplifying your workflow and reducing complexity.
• Enhance Customer Engagement: Keep your customers informed and engaged with automated marketing tools, text reminders, and follow-ups. With integrated communication tools, you’ll deliver exceptional service that strengthens relationships and boosts customer loyalty.
• Increase Efficiency & Profitability: Benefit from seamless integrations with CRM, booking, and marketing tools that reduce manual work, streamline operations, and ultimately increase profitability. Plus, you’ll continue to have the flexibility to use Tekmetric’s 70+ integrations in our robust ecosystem, with Shopgenie continuing to build and support integrations with other shop management systems.

Here’s what our leadership has to say:

“This combination sets a new standard for efficiency and customer experience in the industry. At Tekmetric, we are committed to providing shop owners with best-in-class tools to manage and grow their businesses. Similarly, Shopgenie’s ability to solve real-world challenges with intuitive technology has earned it the trust of shop owners nationwide,” said Sunil Patel, Founder and CEO of Tekmetric. “Together, we are building an all-in-one platform that empowers shop owners to attract, retain and serve customers more effectively, driving long-term growth.”

“Tekmetric’s relentless pursuit of innovation and passion for creating products that make shop owners’ lives easier could not be a more perfect fit for Shopgenie and our customers,” said Kieran O’Brien, CEO and Co-Founder of Shopgenie. “Our combined strengths will create a more complete, powerful platform that sets a new standard for auto repair software solutions.”

At Tekmetric, helping shops measure up is at the core of everything we do. With this combination, we’re building a seamless, all-in-one solution to manage every aspect of your shop more effectively. Together, we’re setting a new benchmark for the industry and aim to take your shop to the next level. Learn more at https://www.tekmetric.com/shopgenie.

Role-based access is the ability to control what each employee can see and do in your shop management software based on the job they hold. A technician clocks into jobs and completes inspections. A service advisor builds estimates, sells work, and takes payment. An owner sees the money. Each person gets what the job requires and nothing beyond it.

At one location, you can run loose. You are in the building. You hear the conversation at the front counter, you notice the discount before it posts, and you can walk 20 feet to correct something. Permissions are a convenience.

At three locations, they become the only way a standard survives when you are not there to enforce it.

What role-based access actually means in a shop management system

Two ideas sit underneath the term, and they are worth separating because vendors use them interchangeably.

A role is a job function with a default bundle of access attached. Roles are defined by titles like owner, manager, service advisor, and technician. It is the starting point when you create an employee.

A permission is a single switch that determines if someone can post a repair order, export a customer list, edit a labor rate, and refund a payment.

A system with roles but no granular permissions forces you into whoever the vendor decided a "technician" is. A system with granular permissions but no way to save a configuration forces you to rebuild that configuration by hand for every new hire. What you want is both — job-level roles you can adjust, and the ability to save the adjusted version and reuse it.

That last part is where most operators get stuck, and what breaks at scale.

What changes when you go from one shop to many

Three things shift, and they compound.

You stop being in the building

This is the obvious one and still the most underrated. Presence is a control system. Remove it and you need something to take its place.

"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 half of it. The other half is deciding, in advance, what each person is able to do when nobody is watching.

Every standard you set needs something holding it in place

Multi-shop operators spend real effort standardizing digital vehicle inspection templates, canned jobs, the labor matrix, and discount policies. Then they hand that standard to 20 people across five buildings and hope.

Permissions are what turn a policy into a setting. If only a manager can apply a discount above a set dollar threshold, the policy holds by default instead of by memory. If only two people at each store can unpost a repair order, your month-end numbers stay clean.

Auditing turns into a job nobody has time for

At one shop with six employees, you can check everyone's access in 10 minutes. At six shops with 60 employees, you cannot.

This is where some multi-shop operators fail. It is not that operators set permissions badly. It is that they set them once, correctly, and then never look again. Six months and four hires later, nobody can tell you who has access to what.

The permissions that carry the most risk across locations

If you are evaluating software, these are the specific controls worth asking a vendor to show you in a demo.

• Discount and pricing authority. Who can apply a discount? Who can change a labor rate or a pricing matrix? Every dollar discounted comes off the repair order total, which means it comes off both your average repair order (ARO) and your gross profit.
• Posting and unposting repair orders. Posting finalizes the repair order and creates the accounting entries. Unposting reverses it. You want the second one narrow: enough people to fix a genuine error, not enough to make your reporting unreliable.
• Employee and permissions management. Who can grant access is a separate question from who can edit an employee record. A system that treats them as one switch is giving away more than you think.
• Reporting visibility. A store manager should see their store. Not everyone needs the portfolio view.
• Customer export. The ability to download your customer list is the ability to walk out with it.
• Payments and accounts receivable. Anything that moves money after the fact, including open balances on fleet and credit accounts.
• Audit visibility. Login History shows who accessed the platform and when. The Inventory Activity Feed shows who changed what in parts. Permissions tell you what someone can do. Audit trails tell you what they did.

How to set this up before you open the next location

• Write the roles down before you touch the software. List every job title you actually have, not the four the software ships with. Master technician and apprentice are different jobs. So are store managers and service advisors.
• Build them as reusable groups, not one-off profiles. If you are adjusting permissions employee by employee after the fact, you have built something you cannot maintain and cannot audit.
• Decide what cross-location access means. Most people need one store. A handful need several. A very small number need everything. Be deliberate about which is which.
• Set the exception path. Someone will need something they do not have, at 4 p.m. on a Friday. Decide now who grants it and whether it gets reversed.
• Put a quarterly review on the calendar. Access drifts. Roles change, people move stores, someone gets covered for a week and keeps the access.

How Tekmetric handles role-based access across locations

Tekmetric is an all-in-one auto repair platform, and employee access is managed in one place rather than shop by shop.

New employees start from a default role — admin, service advisor, or technician — each with its own permission set. From there you can either adjust individual permissions or assign a saved permission group, so a master technician and a junior technician can carry genuinely different access without either being configured from scratch.

For operators running more than one location, the setup happens once. You create the employee in the Tekmetric Multi-Shop dashboard, choose their role and permissions, and select which shops they belong to. You also can see every employee in the organization in one list, including which shops each person is in and what their role is at each.

Organization owners set a separate level of Multi-Shop access on top of shop-level permissions, which is how you give a regional lead the portfolio view while a store manager keeps a store view. And because every permission change is logged with who made it, what changed, and when, the quarterly audit stops being an archaeology project.

"I've gone from doing the transaction to running the store to now have a team of ops guys that run the stores."
— Matt Schwab, Clutch Automotive (MSO)

That progression is the whole point. Delegation is not a personality trait, it is an infrastructure question. You can only hand a store to somebody once the system can define what they are handing back.

The takeaway

Role-based access is unglamorous, and it is the difference between an operator who has five successful shops and an operator who has five struggling shops. Set the roles before you need them. Build them as groups you can reuse. Look at them again every quarter.

Then you are free to go somewhere else and still trust that the standard is still holding.

In an era where digital solutions are rapidly transforming industries, the auto repair space is no exception. Fortunately, in addition to increasing efficiency and streamlining customer service, this growing reliance on digital systems also offers an opportunity to enhance transparency. Transparency is essential to building trust and empowering vehicle owners with the knowledge they need to make informed decisions regarding repairs. When leveraged correctly, digital solutions can bridge the gap between auto repair shops and customers, creating opportunities for transparency from the moment the customer brings the vehicle to your shop to the final payment and pick-up.

Using Technology to Educate Your Customers

In an industry where trust is paramount, educating your customers is one of the best value-adds you can offer. When done conveniently and thoroughly, education can help the customer better understand their vehicle’s problems, the necessity of the proposed repairs and what additional repairs need immediate attention. This in turn allows them to make the best decision for the health of their vehicle and their safety as the driver.

Digital solutions can play a significant role in educating customers. In conjunction with the technicians who complete the repair, service advisors are in a unique position to educate the customer about their vehicle and repairs. When the service advisor takes the time to clearly share the technician’s diagnosis and proposed repairs, the customer can better understand where their money is going. Digital solutions can help streamline this process, which makes customers more likely to approve repairs – ultimately driving your average repair order. Some digital solutions include:

• Digital Vehicle Inspections. Aside from cost, customers care about two things when it comes to repairs: what repair is needed to get the car back on the road, and how long it will take. DVIs fulfill both needs – and they provide the information in a digital format the customer can easily access and understand. With the right mix of photos and videos sent to the customer, vehicle owners can see the healthy and unhealthy parts of their vehicle. By using DVIs as a tool to educate your customers clearly and conveniently, you can foster a relationship based in trust and transparency from the beginning.
• MotoVisuals. Tekmetric’s MotoVisuals integration makes explaining tricky car problems easy. MotoVisuals offers a wide selection of simple-to-follow animated videos about general vehicle repairs to accompany your DVI. By sharing a MotoVisuals video with the vehicle owner, you can leverage top-notch visuals to effortlessly explain repairs without confusing tech jargon. This can help make it an easy “yes” for the vehicle owner when it comes to approving repairs.  

Building Trust by Meeting Customers Where They Are

A big part of establishing transparency in your shop is creating convenience for your customers. Through convenient digital tools, you can share information with customers easily and clearly in a format they can access anytime, anywhere. For example, by facilitating a convenient, two-way digital conversation, you can share repair updates and answer questions all through a simple text. You can even share photos and videos to further illustrate your recommendations. When customers can text you and get immediate responses, they can rest assured that your shop will meet their needs in an efficient manner.

At Tekmetric, two-way texting and text-to-pay both build on convenience through transparent communication, from repair questions to financial needs and payment options:

• Two-way texting. Two-way texting allows for open communication between your shop and the customer in a format that is accessible anytime, from anywhere. Nearly all parts of the repair process can be completed via text, from sharing DVIs to gaining customer approvals.  Customers can view images of their car and ask questions, and the service advisor can respond with clear explanations or even share videos through MotoVisuals. This also creates a simple, transparent record of the repair process, including time and date stamps, whether a customer viewed the message and more.
• Text-to-pay. Vehicle repairs are often one of the most expensive purchases a customer can make. Therefore, it’s important to offer financial options that are easy to access, so they can easily review the invoice and submit payment. Text-to-pay provides the tools shop owners need to offer a seamless, convenient payment experience for customers, while keeping data secure and fully integrated into the Tekmetric system.

Establishing Transparency Through Secure Digital Payment Options

Transparency is critical from start to finish in the auto repair process. You work hard to establish and build trust with the vehicle owner throughout the repair – so it’s crucial to maintain the same level of transparency at the final touchpoint: the payment. After the repair, you should offer a secure form of payment your customer will be able to review, clearly understand and complete in a format that is easiest for them.

• Buy Now, Pay Later. When it comes to finances, most repairs are surprise purchases for vehicle owners. Even with a budget, there is no way a customer can anticipate the exact cost of the necessary repair ahead of time. By offering payment installment options through Buy Now, Pay Later, shop owners can demonstrate transparency about the total cost of the repairs while providing options for financing so the customer can complete the repair while adhering to their budget.
• Integrated Payments. Shops run more efficiently with integrated payments due to a visible, centralized location. Integrated payments allow customers to pay without being at the shop or needing a physical credit card. Within one click, the customer can pay, streamlining the final part of the customer experience and maximizing the shop’s workflow through a quick and painless payment process.

Transparency fosters greater trust and loyalty between auto repair shops and vehicle owners. By providing clear and open communication throughout the auto repair process, shops can build stronger relationships, gain new business and increase customer satisfaction. The more transparent you are, the greater the vehicle owner’s trust in your shop. This enhances your reputation and your business performance, leading to more customers, an excellent customer experience and ultimately greater profitability.