Overview
BayDocket runs the front desk of an independent auto repair shop in one place: customers and vehicles, estimates, digital vehicle inspections, two-way texting with customer approvals, invoices and payments, scheduling, inventory, and reports. Every feature is included in every subscription — there are no tiers and no add-on modules.
This page shows you the layout, the three staff roles, and where to go next.
The shell
Sign in and you land on the repair order list — the working queue of the shop. Everything else hangs off the sidebar on the left.
The repair order list. ① The sidebar — every surface is one click away. ② Search. ③ New repair order — two clicks from here to a workable estimate.
What the sidebar holds:
- Assistant — a chat that runs plain-English commands against your shop (“add an oil change to RO 42”). It confirms before anything customer-facing.
- Repair orders — the list and the estimate builder. Where most of the day happens.
- Messages — the shop’s text inbox, one thread per customer.
- Schedule — the appointment day board, week view, and booking.
- Customers — search, customer detail, and every vehicle’s service history.
- Inventory — parts catalog, vendors, and purchase orders.
- Canned jobs — reusable job templates you apply to an estimate in two clicks.
- Reports — revenue, collected cash, and technician numbers.
- Settings — shop details, tax rates, staff, payment providers, and your subscription.
Role note: what you see depends on your role. Owners see everything, including Reports and the full Settings page. Technicians get a trimmed sidebar built around repair orders and inspections, plus their own My performance page; front-desk screens are read-only for them.
On a phone
BayDocket is a web app — there is nothing to install. On a phone or a narrow window the sidebar collapses into an icon rail and every screen re-flows to fit. Technicians typically run inspections from a phone in the bay.
On a phone the sidebar becomes an icon rail — the same surfaces, one tap each.
The three roles
Every staff member has one of three roles, set when they are invited.
| Role | What it can do |
|---|---|
| Owner | Everything below, plus staff and invites, tax rates, shop identity settings, Reports, and the subscription. Each shop has exactly one Owner — the person who created it. |
| Advisor | The day-to-day front desk: repair orders and estimates, invoices and payments, messaging and approvals, scheduling, inventory, and canned jobs. |
| Technician | Inspections — start them, photograph findings, complete them — plus a personal My performance page with their own billed hours. Beyond that, technicians see repair orders, vehicles, and the schedule in read-only form — the rest of the front desk (customers, messages, inventory, settings) is hidden for them. |
Where things happen
A repair order is the spine of the product. It starts as an estimate, collects jobs and lines (typed by hand, applied from a canned job, or promoted from an inspection finding), goes to the customer by text for per-job approval, and becomes a numbered invoice when the work is done. Payments, deposits, and reversals all land on that same record, and Reports reads from the finished invoices.
The rest of the docs follow the sidebar: front desk, inspections, messaging and approvals, money, scheduling, and shop admin. Each article is a task walkthrough with screenshots, not a feature tour.
Tip: the fastest way to learn BayDocket is to make a throwaway repair order and press everything. An estimate stays editable until you generate an invoice, and nothing customer-facing sends without an explicit action.