Auto & Mechanic Shops
A shop needs the uptime and the data protection of a much bigger operation, without a full-time IT person or an enterprise budget. We take on the whole thing — the shop management system, the network across the bays, the backups and the security — for one agreed monthly number, so the lifts keep turning and you are not the one under a desk with a flashlight.
What goes wrong
These are the calls we actually get from shops.
Labour is what you sell. When the shop system is down, cars sit on lifts and you are paying wages either way — a morning of it costs more than a year of doing this properly.
Work finished, customer at the counter, card in hand, and no way to close the ticket or take the money. They go home and you chase it next week.
What you did to that truck last spring, which jobs are still under warranty, what the comeback was about — all on one machine, with a backup nobody has restored.
What it costs
Use your own numbers, not ours. Take the bays you can actually staff, multiply by your posted labour rate, and multiply that by the hours nothing moved. That is one morning. Then run it again for a full day, because that is what a dead main PC usually turns into.
Your techs are on the clock whether the bays turn or not, and so are the rent, the lights and the note on the alignment rack. A day where nothing gets billed is not a day at zero. It is a day of full cost against no revenue, and it does not come back.
Somebody who stood at your counter with a card and left without their vehicle is telling that story tonight. Some of them come back. Some of them call the shop on the next block, and you keep paying for that afternoon long after the system is fixed.
A warranty dispute is won with the repair order: what you fitted, what you charged, what the mileage was, who signed it. Lose the history and you eat the job, because the only version of events left in the room is the customer’s.
Then there is the week afterwards, spent rebuilding tickets from paper and memory while new cars keep arriving — and the sentence you have to say to everyone who calls for a status, which is that you do not know.
What we do about it
A shop is a metal building full of interference, and the network gets designed for that rather than for an office.
Estimating, parts and diagnostics get priority over everything else sharing the connection, and the machines running them get replaced before they die on a Friday afternoon rather than after.
Access points placed for a steel building with a lift in it, not for a carpeted room with a desk — so the tablet works where the car is.
The shop management database restored on a schedule and reported to you, so warranty and comeback history survives the day that PC finally goes.
What is covered
All of these are included in a managed agreement — you do not buy them separately or wonder which one a problem falls under. What follows is what each of them actually means in a shop.
The machine the shop system runs on, the workstations at the counter and in the bays, the printer that prints the repair order and the label printer nobody can ever get working — plus the vendor call when something has to be escalated. We open the ticket and stay on it rather than handing you back the phone.
A shop is steel, concrete and moving vehicles, and one access point in the office does not cover the back bay. Coverage designed for the building you have, so a scan tool uploads from where the car is parked instead of only from the counter.
The one that decides whether a dead PC costs you an afternoon or your repair history. Database-aware, restored on a schedule, reported to you, and rehearsed — so the time to get invoicing again is a number somebody has measured rather than a hope.
You hold names, addresses, vehicle records and card payments, and the waiting room Wi-Fi is open to anyone who walks in. Layered protection on every device and mailbox, named logins so a voided ticket or a discount traces to a person, and the customer Wi-Fi kept off the network the shop runs on.
Estimates and approvals that land in the customer’s inbox instead of their spam folder, because an estimate nobody sees is a bay that does not turn. Plus the domain records that stop somebody sending fake invoices in your shop’s name.
Not something you buy. Your network, licences and accounts written down, kept current and registered in the shop’s name — so the setup does not live in one person’s head, including ours.
What we find
Not guesses. These are the specific faults that turn a bad hour into a lost day, and they are usually all present at once. You can check every one of them against your own shop this afternoon.
Your shop management system keeps every repair order in a live database file. Copy that file at file level while the service is still writing to it and you get something that looks like a backup and will not restore. It runs green every night for years, and you find out on the one morning it matters. Ask whoever set yours up when they last restored it somewhere and opened a ticket in it. If the answer is never, you do not have a backup, you have a folder.
Estimating, parts lookups, labour times and card payments all leave the building the same way. When that line drops, all four stop at the same moment, and the shop finds out at the counter. A second connection that takes over on its own is not an expensive thing to add. Most shops have simply never been told they could.
The diagnostic tablets, the machine that holds nine years of repair orders and the password taped up in the waiting room all sit on the same network with nothing between them. Anything that gets onto one of them can reach all of them — a guest laptop, a tool that came in with somebody’s used equipment, or a customer who is just curious. Separating them takes an afternoon and almost nobody has done it.
Getting started
A shop cannot give up a day of billable hours while somebody rewires its network. The whole onboarding is built around that, and you know the plan before anything is touched.
Every machine, tablet, licence and account written down — including the tower under the counter nobody can account for and the switch in the parts room. You get the inventory whether or not you go ahead with us.
Before we change anything, you get a straight answer on how long you would be unable to invoice if the main PC died tonight, and what is driving that number.
Cutovers, cabling and anything that interrupts the shop system are scheduled for evenings or whichever day you run light — you tell us which day that is, because you know and we do not.
Written down and kept current, in your name. If you ever leave us, you leave with the documentation rather than starting again from nothing.
Questions we get
Yes, and we do the talking. When something has to be escalated to them we open the ticket, sit on it and come back to you with the answer — rather than telling you it is a software problem and stepping back.
We do not resell any shop management system, so we have no reason to push you off the one you have. If it works for how you write tickets, our job is to make it fast and keep it running.
No. We inventory what is actually there and tell you where it stands, including how long you would be unable to invoice if it failed tonight. Then you decide.
What we will not do is take on a shop and stay quiet about a machine we know is going to fail. You get a straight recommendation with the reason and the number attached, and it is your call whether to act now or plan for it.
On most shops we walk into, everything stops: estimating, parts, labour times and card payments all leave through the same line. The fix is a second connection that takes over automatically, so the counter keeps working while the first one is repaired.
The honest part is that failover is not free and it is not instant for every system — some things reconnect in seconds, some need a person to click something. We will tell you which of yours is which before you pay for it.
A stopped shop is a Critical priority: thirty minutes to respond, written into the agreement rather than printed on a poster. Responding is not the same as fixing and we will not pretend otherwise — but you will be talking to somebody who already knows what you run instead of reading your setup off a form.
The full set of response targets is on the support page.
One agreed monthly number, quoted for your shop rather than published as a list you would have to argue with. How many people touch a computer, how many bays and sites, and what is actually on the network all move it.
Hardware, licences and third-party subscriptions stay yours and are billed at cost. Larger projects get quoted before they start. See how the plans compare.
It is yours and it always was. Every account, licence and domain is registered in the shop’s name rather than ours, and the documentation goes with you.
We would rather you stayed because the service is good than because leaving is painful.
Get started
Tell us which shop management system you run and roughly what the main PC is. We will put two numbers in writing: how long you would realistically be unable to invoice if it died tonight, and what an idle day costs you at your own labour rate. No charge, and no obligation to use us afterwards.
