AI assistant

The assistant is a chat that works the counter for you: type (or dictate) what you want — “add the brake job to RO 42”, “what’s the balance on the Herrera Civic?” — and it does it. It only ever acts through the same actions you have with your own permissions, so it structurally cannot do anything you couldn’t do yourself by hand.

What it can do

Things it does immediately, narrating each step as it goes:

• Look things up — repair orders, customers, a customer’s vehicles, canned jobs, appointments, staff, an estimate’s jobs and totals, an invoice balance.
• Edit an estimate — add, change, delete, or move part and labor lines, create and rename jobs, apply a canned job, set a discount or fee. The same rules as the estimate builder apply: an invoiced repair order is locked to it too.
• Assign a technician to labor lines.
• Add a vehicle to a customer’s profile — give it a VIN and it fills in the year, make, and model for you.

Things it proposes but never runs without your tap on a confirm card:

• Create a repair order for an existing customer and vehicle.
• Change a repair order’s status.
• Book or reschedule an appointment.
• Text the customer their approval link.

Money stays human: the assistant never finalizes an invoice, records a payment or deposit, or reverses one — those live on the invoice screen. It also never writes its own text messages to customers; the approval text it can send is the shop’s standard message.

Asking for something

1. Click Assistant at the top of the sidebar and stay on the Chat tab.
2. Type your request in the composer and press Enter. Refer to a repair order by its number the way you’d say it — 42, #42, or RO-42 all work — or just describe it (“the Altima that came in this morning”).
3. Watch it work. While it runs, the reply shows the steps it is taking in plain language — “Looked up the RO”, “Added the job” — and you can expand the step list on any finished reply to see what it did.
4. Read the answer. When the reply is about a repair order, a Records link under it opens that repair order directly, and up to two suggested follow-ups appear above the composer — click one to send it.

A finished turn. The steps it took sit above the reply — expand them any time — and the Records link opens the repair order it worked on.

Tip: if you’re not sure where to start, the empty chat offers example commands like “What’s the balance on RO #42?” — click one to run it.

If your request is ambiguous — two customers with the same name, two matching vehicles — the assistant asks which one you mean rather than guessing.

Confirming an action

When you ask for one of the harder-to-undo actions, the assistant stops and shows a card labeled Needs your approval with a plain summary of exactly what it wants to do.

1. Read the summary — it names the action and the specifics (“Text the approval link”, who to, which repair order).
2. Click Confirm & send to run it, or Cancel to drop it. The composer waits until you decide.

A confirm card. Nothing leaves the shop until you press Confirm & send — the composer is paused beneath it until you decide.

Note: the confirmation is per action. Approving one proposal never pre-approves the next — every customer-facing or status-changing step gets its own card.

Dictating instead of typing

Click the microphone button in the composer to dictate. Your speech lands in the input as text; tap the microphone again to stop, review what it heard, and press Enter to send. Dictation uses your browser’s built-in speech recognition — on browsers without it, the button simply doesn’t appear and you type instead.

The Activity tab

Everything the assistant has ever done for your shop is on the Activity tab: when, who asked, the command, the steps that ran, and the outcome. Click a row to expand its full step-by-step trace. The chat itself is scratch paper — it clears when you leave the page — but every turn is kept in the Activity log, and it covers every staff member’s use of the assistant, not just yours.

The Activity tab. Every turn is kept — expand a row for the full list of steps it ran.

Changes the assistant makes to a repair order also appear in that repair order’s own activity log, attributed to you — you asked for them, so they’re yours, exactly as if you’d clicked them.

Roles and limits

Role note: the Assistant page is for Owners and Advisors — it runs front-desk actions, so Technicians don’t see it in the sidebar. See Staff and roles for what each role covers.

Worth knowing:

• The assistant works with your shop’s real data and nothing else. It can’t see other shops, and it can’t reach past your own role’s permissions.
• It never invents prices. Lines it adds from a canned job carry the template’s prices; anything else is priced only at what you told it.
• It follows the same locks as the screens: it can’t edit an invoiced repair order, can’t send an approval to a customer who opted out of texting, and can’t move a repair order through a status change the app itself wouldn’t allow.
• Long requests have a working budget — if a request needs too many steps in one turn, the assistant stops partway and tells you so. Break a very large request into smaller ones.
• On a canceled subscription the page still opens read-only: you can read the Activity log, but the composer is disabled until you resubscribe.