Tekmetric Multi-Shop is designed to give owners everything they need to manage multiple shops in one place. Our goal is to help your team gain back time, make more informed decisions, and maximize your shops’ margins!
Our latest update for Tekmetric Multi-Shop, Shared Customer History, does just that! With stronger cohesion between different locations, multi-shop owners and service advisors can simplify their workflow and provide a more seamless customer experience.
Tekmetric Multi-Shop Shared Customer History allows users to connect customers across shops and view history for those customers across all locations within their organization in Tekmetric. With just a few clicks, shop owners and general managers can quickly add customers from one shop location to another without actually typing out all their information again. This means shops can provide a seamless customer experience across all locations and easily maintain customer information without worrying about duplicating entries.
Gain a better handle on your customer information and provide a better experience at the same time.
By linking customer data so that service writers have access to all past information -- digital vehicle inspections, estimates generated, approved or declined work, and completed repairs -- you can save your shop time while enabling a more personalized experience for the customer.
Remind customers of that declined brake job from your other location, or check up on the status of the leaky oil line to see if it's finally time for replacement. To the customer, this will feel like the truly modern experience they've grown accustomed to in this new digital age.
And they'll be impressed with how on-top-of-things your shop is!
Fewer clicks on your end means a more cohesive and streamlined process, which results in a smooth, frictionless experience for the customer:
Overall, Shared Customer History enables your shop to provide your customers with the same experience, no matter what location they visit. It’ll be like they're visiting the exact same business, with the same care and support they’ve already come to expect.
So, if that customer is on vacation or a business trip and has to stop by a different location for the first time, your shop will immediately have visibility into the history of everything they've done at your other locations, and you can pick up from where they left off like it’s the exact same shop.
And the benefits really don't stop there. There's so many ways to fuel your business's growth with the right multi-shop platform.
Your shop’s ability to grow, make a profit, and succeed hinges on clear and accurate invoicing.
If you’re still using pen and paper for your invoice software, you probably spend a lot of time reconciling records at the end of the day and may even have to stay late to put your books in order.
Paper means lots of copies, transposition of information, and a high probability of making mistakes. The same holds true if you’re using multiple software programs to juggle records at your shop to put together information for invoices. If you aren’t using a single, comprehensive system, there’s a good chance details will be incorrectly copied or left out.
Mechanic interviews are challenging for both the employer and candidate because the right candidate has to be a fit in personality and technical ability. Plus, the numerous certification types, manufacturer nuances, and shop needs make it even more challenging to become a mechanic.
This guide can be used to help repair shops/dealerships ask the right questions and also help technicians be prepared for questions they will likely encounter. Below you will find the most common car mechanic interview questions broken down by mechanic and service advisor level plus tips to ace your next interview.
While every auto repair shop differs in how they run their job interview process, these are some of the most common questions you can expect. Ranging from technical questions to customer service, be prepared to answer these common questions before your next interview.
These common questions cover basic automotive repair experience and relevant work history.
These technical interview questions cover more specific hand-on experience and tools/equipment.
These questions help employers understand how you would handle various shop situations and also helps them understand your communication skills.
While the interview questions for service advisors will be similar to mechanics, there will be small differences. Typically, service advisors will be more customer facing and shops will tailor their questions to focus more on customer service and communication style.
Interviews are challenging in any industry but mechanic interviews can be even more challenging with the shortage of talent available. This guide will help you either prepare for your next interview or provide you with common questions to ask your next hire. Lastly, always hire for culture fit and talent second. Culture problems are a lot harder to correct than technical car knowledge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Those five inputs are what separate a high-ARO location from a low-ARO one. Walk them in order, per shop:
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.
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)
Once you can see the gap and its causes, closing it is a matter of focus. A few takeaways:
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.
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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