Software for the independent workshop

Five stations, and the only question is whether they talk

A repair job runs through the same five stations everywhere: intake, planning, parts, time, billing. The question is never whether a workshop has them — it has them — but whether they talk to each other.

Where they do not, the same work happens two and three times. The plate is written down at intake, copied onto the parts order, typed a third time for the invoice. Every copy is a chance for a transposed digit, and a transposed digit surfaces at the customer at the earliest.

The test costs no demo: take a finished job from last week and count how often the same plate was written by hand. Anything above one is transfer work, and it is also the reason there is still paper on the counter in the evening. The mirror image holds too — a solution covering one of the five stations pushes the problem to its edges. An invoicing program next to a paper diary creates exactly the retyping it was bought to remove.

What we do and do not do belongs right here. A vehicle is entered once and then sits on the customer record with its history and its documents. Filling it in automatically from a registration number is something our software does not do today. In several of the markets these pages reach that is the first thing a competitor demonstrates, so put the question to every supplier — including us — and take a date rather than a nod.

Independent means multi-make, and that is a software question

Manufacturer-tied systems are built around a fleet the independent workshop does not have. They expect one make, one service schedule, one parts catalogue. They get awkward the morning a hatchback, a van and a twelve-year-old small car are on the lifts together.

Practically that comes down to three requirements:

• Vehicle records must not assume a make. Cars, vans, trailers and the occasional motorcycle belong in one history, not in separate systems.
• Labour times must stay freely calculable. A shop that bills to a manufacturer's figures has handed away its own hourly rate, and the rate is the control you actually have.
• The customer base belongs to the shop. Not to a make, not to a system supplier. That one sounds obvious and is not — it decides what a change of supplier costs you in five years.

The exclusion belongs in the same breath rather than in a footnote. We carry no technical data and no parts catalogues — no labour-time database, no OE catalogue. What we do carry is your own stock: parts, tyre storage, depots and parking spaces, wired into the job. If your buying decision hangs on a technical-data subscription, that is a second product beside this one, and it is better known now than in week two of a trial.

What changes between one person and ten

The same software solves a different problem in a one-person shop than in one with six people. Comparing with the wrong size in your head is how you buy past your own need.

• Alone. The problem is the diary and the invoice, not coordination. What counts is that nothing is left over in the evening: appointment, work order and invoice in one pass, with no hand-over to anybody.
• Two to four. Coordination appears. Who takes the car in, who works on it, who calls back? The value shifts from filling things in to seeing them — where each job stands and what it is waiting on.
• Five and up. Assignment becomes compulsory. Times per person, releases with a name on them, occupancy per lift. None of those questions can be answered without personal logins, and a single shared login makes them permanently unanswerable.

Which is why the price model is not a pure cost question. A shop that pays per seat economises first on precisely the thing that is most expensive to be without: its people's own logins. The account that gets skipped is the part-timer's or the apprentice's — the same account that would have told you who released the job.

Integrations: the question that belongs before the contract

Hardly any workshop runs one program. Beside it sit a parts supplier, the bookkeeping and the payment side. Each of those connections is either an integration or a person retyping figures.

The useful question to a supplier is therefore not “is there an integration with X” — the answer is almost always yes. It is:

• Does it run in both directions, or only outward?
• Is it in the price or does it cost extra? Whose contract is it?
• What happens when the other side changes its format, and who notices first?

Our own answer, without a detour: there is no direct accounting integration today — not to Xero, not to QuickBooks, not to an equivalent. That is table stakes in every English-speaking market and we would rather write it here than have you find it in the trial. What leaves the system instead is a PDF plus a machine-readable document to the European norm; whether that covers your bookkeeping is answered on the invoicing page.

One thing worth knowing before you weigh a competitor's integration list against that: an integration is a promise about somebody else's software. Ask who maintains it, what happens in the week it breaks, and whether you can still get your figures out by hand while it is broken. A page of logos answers none of the three.

Whose data is it when you leave?

Customer base, vehicle history, jobs, invoices — that is the value that builds over years. While everything runs, nobody asks the ownership question. It matters on exactly one day: the day you want to move.

Three points belong in the contract rather than in a sales conversation:

• A full export in a readable format, at any time and at no extra cost. A stack of PDFs is not an export, it is a printout.
• What happens after cancellation. How long do the data stay retrievable, in what form are they handed over, when are they deleted?
• Where they sit. Server location and a processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR are not a formality: customer records and plates together are personal data.

Independently of all that, the retention duty runs on. Your records have to survive long after a supplier contract ends — and whoever only thinks about that at the switch pays for access to his own past.

The smallest thing with the largest return: pull that full export once, for real, in the first month. An export nobody has ever run is a promise. An export sitting on your own disk is a fact.

The computer is in the office; the work happens at the lift

Any entry that requires a walk to a desk gets postponed, and a postponed entry is a remembered entry. That is the whole of this subject, and it is why it sits on the page about deciding rather than in a feature list: where the entry happens decides whether your times are measured or estimated, and that decides whether the invoice is right.

“Is it mobile” is too blunt a question to separate two suppliers. These three are not:

• Does it run in the phone's browser, or does every mechanic need an installation and an app-store account? The second answer is not fatal, but it is a rollout — and it is a rollout again for every temporary worker and every new phone.
• Does the person at the lift get a view of his own, or the office screen made smaller? A planning board rendered on a phone is technically mobile and practically unusable. What is needed there is one job and one control, not the whole desk.
• How many taps from picking up the phone to a running timer? If the answer is a login and three screens, the entry will happen in the evening after all, and you have bought the problem you were trying to solve.

Our own answer, both halves. Time tracking is a start/stop control on the work item itself rather than a separate timesheet to fill in afterwards, and there is nothing to install — it runs in the browser, so a phone or a tablet needs an address and a login and no more than that. The limit is equally plain: there is no native app and no offline mode. A bay at the back of the building with no signal is a real problem for a browser-based system, and it is worth walking your own workshop with a phone before it becomes a question about software at all.

The lever is utilisation, not the hourly rate

When the margin is wrong, the first reflex is to raise the hourly rate. It is rarely the biggest lever and always the most visible one, because it is the only one the customer sees.

The rate is calculated from productive hours, not from hours present. Between the two sit holiday, sickness, set-up, searching, waiting for parts and the unpaid look over an engine. A workshop that calculates as if every attended hour were sellable prices itself systematically low and then wonders about the margin.

This is exactly where planning pays in: seeing which lift is occupied how long, and what a job is waiting on. An hour that is not spent searching is an hour that can be sold — without a single customer seeing a higher price, and without a conversation at the counter.

What that means for your shop can be worked out rather than guessed. The labour rate calculator takes staff costs, overheads and productive hours and shows the rate that covers them — together with the question of how far better utilisation pushes it down.

Who may see what, and what a shared login costs

A registration plate on its own says little about a person. The moment your software ties it to a name, an address, an email or a phone number, the whole becomes personal data — and that is what a workshop system does all day. The GDPR therefore applies in a shop with three people, quite apart from whether anyone needs a data protection officer.

Three things are practically relevant and cost nothing but a decision:

• Personal logins. Not only for privacy, but because without them no statement about times, releases and changes is possible. One shared login undoes traceability entirely.
• Roles instead of full access. The holiday cover needs the work order, not the revenue overview.
• A processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR. Anyone having data processed in a cloud needs that contract with the supplier. Serious suppliers offer it unprompted; if you have to hunt for it, you already have your first answer.

Where the data physically sit belongs to the same question, and it is one to put to every supplier: which country are the servers in, and do I get that in writing? “In the cloud” is not an answer. Ours is on the home page — servers in Germany, processed under EU law — and it is worth exactly as much as our willingness to put it in a contract rather than in a headline. Ask for it there.

The most common gap is banal and only shows up at a leaving date: accounts of departed staff that were never withdrawn.

Switching while the lifts stay busy

No workshop can close for a week to introduce software. So a switch works as a sequence, not as a cut-off date.

What has proven itself:

• Master data first — customers and vehicles, imported rather than retyped. That is the part that takes longest and hurts least, because work carries on beside it.
• Then intake. From a chosen date, new jobs run entirely in the new system and old ones are finished in the old one. Four weeks of two truths side by side is unpleasant but clear. A half-migrated job is neither.
• Billing last, deliberately on a month boundary: the invoice number sequence must get neither a gap nor a duplicate, and that is the one part nobody can repair afterwards.

The old data do not move with you. They have to stay readable, not editable — a retention duty asks for access to the original, not for an import. A full export of the old system, filed properly, satisfies that and spares you the expensive variant: paying an old contract for years purely to be able to look things up.

Pull that export while the old system is still running and still paid for. It is the one step that cannot be taken later, and it is the one people skip because on the day of the switch everything else looks more urgent.

Eight questions before you decide

Short enough for a sales call, concrete enough that evasion is noticeable:

• How often does the same plate have to be retyped between intake and invoice?
• Does the system fill the vehicle in from the registration number itself — and if not, is there a date?
• Is there a direct link to the bookkeeping package I already use?
• Does the invoice come out of the work order, or beside it?
• Do I get a full export at any time? What does it cost, and in what format does it arrive?
• What happens to my data after I cancel?
• Is the price per seat or per shop? What changes with the fifth member of staff?
• Which country are the servers in, and do I get that in writing?

Two of these eight we answer with no today — the second and the third. It stands here because otherwise you would find it in the trial, and because a supplier who answers all eight with an unhesitating yes probably was not listening to the question.

The answer to the seventh is on the pricing page; what the system does on an ordinary working day is shown by the features page.