Automotive · App Starter
Auto Repair Shop Template
Estimates, repair orders, parts, and service history on one screen per car — generated into a codebase your shop owns.
A repair shop's real inventory is information: what's wrong with the car, what the customer approved, which parts are on the truck, and what this vehicle's been through before. This starter generates that as a working app — write the estimate, win the approval, move the RO across the board, and keep the history that brings the customer back.
- 6 shop entities
- RO board built in
- Code you own
- Vibe + Governed modes
01 · Data model
What's inside: the data model
The vehicle, not the invoice, is the center of a shop's data. These six tables connect every car to its owner, its estimates, its repair orders, and the parts that went into it — so the whole story is one lookup by plate or VIN.
| table | what it holds |
|---|---|
vehicles | Each car by VIN and plate — year, make, model, engine, mileage at every visit — with its full work history attached. |
customers | Vehicle owners with contact preferences and every car they've brought in, so the household with three vehicles is one relationship, not three records. |
estimates | Itemized quotes with labor lines, parts, and tax — sent for approval, with each line's approved-or-declined status recorded. |
repair_orders | Approved work in progress: assigned technician, status from intake through quality check to pickup, and actual hours against quoted. |
parts | Parts on the shelf and on order — cost, markup, supplier, and the RO each one is committed to — so a job never stalls on a mystery backorder. |
technicians | Your techs with certifications and flagged-hour tallies, linked to every RO they've turned wrenches on. |
02 · Screens
Signature modules
Estimate builder
01Build the quote line by line — labor hours, parts with markup applied, shop supplies, tax — and send it to the customer for approval. Declined lines stay on the record, which is exactly the list your service advisor calls through when the timing belt finally lets go.
Repair-order board
02Every RO as a card moving from intake through diagnosis, waiting-on-parts, in-repair, quality check, and ready for pickup. One glance at the board answers the two questions that run a shop day: what's stuck, and what can be promised for five o'clock.
Parts tracking
03Parts carry cost, markup, supplier, and the RO they belong to. When the water pump arrives, the linked RO flags ready-to-resume — and the month-end margin report knows what you actually paid versus what the estimate charged.
Service history
04Every vehicle's timeline: what was done, at what mileage, by whom, with which parts. It settles the is-this-covered conversation with dates instead of arguments, and it powers the reminder that brings the car back at 60,000 for the coolant flush.
03 · Process
How it works
- 1You
Describe your shop
General repair or specialty, how many bays and techs, your labor rate and parts markup, how you handle approvals. That shapes the estimate math and the board columns from the start.
- 2Vibe mode
Tune it in Vibe mode
Add an inspection checklist to intake, a tire-storage tracker, or a diagnostic-fee line that credits against approved work — conversational changes that arrive as real code.
- 3Governed mode
Go live through the governed pipeline
Deploy on your own infrastructure with approval gates and an audit trail. Customer and vehicle records stay in your database — the shop's history is the shop's asset.
04 · Fit
Who the Auto Repair Shop starter is for
Independent shop owners done with monthly software rent
The going rate for shop management software is a few hundred a month, forever, for features you half use. Generate the system once, run it on cheap hosting, and put the difference toward a scan tool that actually earns money.
Service advisors living between the phone and the board
The advisor's whole job is state: which estimates await approval, which cars await parts, which customers await a callback. One screen holding all three means promises get made from facts, and the four o'clock pickup rush stops producing surprises.
Specialty and performance shops with unusual workflows
A shop doing engine builds or restorations runs jobs for weeks, not hours — with stage payments, customer-supplied parts, and photo documentation along the way. Off-the-shelf shop software fights that shape; a generated codebase is edited to match it.
Growing shops adding a second location
When bay two becomes building two, per-user-per-location pricing punishes the growth. With your own codebase, the second shop is a location field and a deployment decision — the customer and vehicle history stays unified where it belongs.
05 · Yours
Customize it, own it
Make it yours
Make the app talk shop the way yours does. Adjust the labor rate matrix and parts markup tiers, add a digital inspection checklist with photos that feeds straight into estimate lines, set up canned jobs for the services you sell every day, or add a customer-approval link that timestamps the yes. In Vibe mode each is a conversational edit that lands as reviewable code.
Bigger moves are ordinary work in a codebase you own: wire in a VIN-decode lookup so intake autofills year, make, and engine; connect a parts supplier feed; text customers automatically when the RO hits ready-for-pickup; or schedule service reminders off mileage history. The running app has no dependency on Dual7 — extend it like any software your business owns.
Why a starter, not a subscription
Shop management subscriptions charge monthly per user or per location, and your customer list — the asset a shop sells with the business — lives on the vendor's servers. This starter generates the entire system as source code in your repository: schema, screens, estimate math, and history. Your data sits in your database, the bill is your hosting, and adding an advisor login costs nothing.
The plain trade: you run the software as well as the shop. Dual7's governed pipeline keeps that from becoming a second job — changes go through approval gates before they touch live records, everything is audit-trailed, and when your process changes you regenerate rather than patch. A well-kept system, like a well-kept bay, pays for the discipline.
Auto Repair Shop template — frequently asked questions
What does the auto repair shop template include?
A working shop system generated as code you own: vehicles, customers, estimates, repair orders, parts, and technicians as connected tables, plus an estimate builder with labor and markup math, a repair-order status board, parts tracking tied to ROs, and per-vehicle service history.
Can customers approve estimates remotely?
Estimates are built for line-level approval — each labor or parts line carries its own approved-or-declined status. Add a customer-facing approval link that records the timestamp against the estimate; it's a small extension to a codebase you control, and Dual7 can generate it with the starter.
Does it track declined work for follow-up?
Yes, and that's deliberate: declined lines stay attached to the vehicle, so every future visit shows what was recommended and passed on. That list is the highest-converting call a service advisor makes all week, and it's a saved filter rather than a memory.
Can it decode VINs or pull labor times?
The starter ships with the schema and screens; VIN-decode and labor-guide lookups are integrations against providers you choose. Because the app is a standard codebase, wiring a VIN API into vehicle intake is routine work — and your data model already has the fields waiting.
How does parts markup work in estimates?
Parts carry your cost and a markup rule — flat percentage or a tiered matrix by price band — and the estimate applies it automatically while preserving both numbers. Month-end, the margin report reads actual cost against charged price per RO, no spreadsheet reconciliation.
Is this for mobile mechanics too?
The starter models a shop: bays, a board, parts on shelves. A mobile operation works fine by treating the van as the location, but if your business is dispatching techs to job sites across town, the field service starter's dispatch-and-routing model is the better foundation.
Related
Dual7 App Starters
Build your Auto Repair Shop on your terms
Estimates, repair orders, parts, and service history on one screen per car — generated into a codebase your shop owns. Describe your version to start — the output is a project you own.