Customers and vehicles

The Customers screen is your shop’s directory: every customer, their vehicles, and each vehicle’s complete repair history. This page covers finding a customer, editing their record, reading a vehicle’s record and history, and the recommendations that carry deferred work from one visit to the next.

Finding a customer

1. Click Customers in the sidebar.
2. Type a name or phone number and click Search (or press Enter).
3. Click a result to open that customer’s record.

With the search box empty, the screen lists the whole directory, so you can also just browse.

The Customers screen. Search by name or phone; click a row to open the customer.

The customer record

A customer’s record has their contact details on the left and their vehicles on the right.

A customer record. Details save with one button; each row in the Vehicles card opens that vehicle’s record.

Edit Name, Phone, or Email and click Save customer. Every field is editable at any time — including the name, and including while the customer has repair orders on the books. Fixing a misspelled name or a wrong number never touches the work already entered.

The phone number matters more than it looks: it is where text messages, approval links, and pay links go. See Text messaging for how the shop’s texting works.

Tax-exempt customers

For a customer who never pays sales tax — a fleet, a dealer, a municipality — check Tax exempt, record the Exemption certificate # if you have one, and click Save customer. From then on their estimates and invoices compute with no tax, and the certificate number appears on each invoice.

Note: invoices you have already generated are frozen documents — toggling the flag changes future invoices, never issued ones.

The Vehicles card lists everything this customer owns; click a vehicle to open its record. New vehicles are added while starting a repair order, where the VIN decode fills in year, make, and model for you — see Your first repair order.

Tip: the Assistant can also file a vehicle for a customer from chat — give it a VIN and it decodes the year, make, and model itself. See AI assistant.

Role note: the Customers screen is Owner and Advisor territory — a Technician’s sidebar does not include it, and front-desk edits are blocked for Technicians. Technicians can still open a vehicle’s record from a repair order and read everything on it.

The vehicle record

The vehicle record is the car’s whole story in one place. The header shows the year, make, and model with the VIN, mileage, and last visit underneath. If the car is in the shop right now, an In shop · RO #42 chip appears next to the title — click it to jump straight to the open repair order.

A vehicle record. Owner and details on the right; recommendations and service history in the main column.

Two actions live in the header:

• Message owner opens the owner’s text thread in Messages, ready to type — even if you have never texted them before.
• Start repair order opens a new repair order with this customer and vehicle already filled in, so the car you were just reading about is one click from a workable estimate.

The Owner card shows who the vehicle belongs to, with an Open button to their customer record and a footer showing how long they have been a customer and how many vehicles they have.

Changing the owner

Sold the car to a family member, or attached it to the wrong customer at check-in? On the Owner card:

1. Click Change.
2. Search for the right customer and click them in the results.
3. Click Confirm change.

The vehicle and all of its repair orders move to the new customer — no deleting and re-entering anything. A confirmation tells you how many repair orders moved.

Note: an owner change is blocked while the vehicle has an invoiced or paid repair order, or an upcoming appointment. Settle those first.

Editing vehicle details

Click Edit on the Details card to change the VIN, year, make, model, engine, or mileage, then Save vehicle (or Cancel to discard). Like customer details, these are editable at any time — a bad VIN decode or an outdated mileage is a ten-second fix.

Service history

The Service history card lists every repair order ever written for this vehicle, newest first: the RO number, date, a Work column summarizing the jobs on it, the status, and the total. Click any row to open that repair order.

The card’s header sums it up — for example, $4,180 across 6 repair orders.

Note: the header figure covers repair orders in every status, open estimates included — it is the vehicle’s whole record, not just invoiced work.

Recommendations

Recommendations are the work a vehicle needs but has not had yet. They live on the vehicle record and resurface automatically on the vehicle’s next repair order, so a “maybe next time” is never forgotten. A recommendation appears three ways:

• A declined job. When a customer declines a job on the approval page, that job becomes a recommendation — labeled with the date and RO number it came from, and priced from the original estimate. See Customer approvals.
• An inspection finding. When an inspection is completed, any Yellow or Red finding you did not put on the estimate becomes a recommendation. See Digital inspections.
• By hand. Click Add on the Recommendations panel, type a title and optional notes, and click Add recommendation — for anything you spotted that has no inspection behind it.

The vehicle’s Recommendations panel, with a chip naming where each item came from. The same items are offered again on the vehicle’s next repair order.

On the vehicle record, open recommendations list with a source chip (Declined … · RO #12, Inspection, or Manual) and an estimated amount where one is known. Dismiss removes an item you have decided not to chase; dismissed and completed items collapse into the Show resolved & dismissed section at the bottom.

When you open a repair order for a vehicle with open recommendations, a Recommended Jobs card appears in the right rail of the estimate builder. Each item has Add and Dismiss:

• Adding a declined job copies it onto the estimate at its original prices, as a new job awaiting the customer’s approval.
• Adding an inspection finding creates a zero-priced part and labor line for you to price.
• Adding a manual recommendation creates an empty job — add lines in the builder.

An added item shows Added ✓ on the card. The recommendation stays open until the work actually happens: when an invoice is generated with that job approved on it, the recommendation resolves on its own. See Invoices and payments.

Note: if the customer declines the same recommended job again, the original recommendation simply stays open — you will not collect duplicates.

Role note: adding, applying, and dismissing recommendations is for Owners and Advisors. Technicians see the panel read-only.