Car repair: a plain-English guide for garage owners

A car repair job rarely stays in one place. The booking starts in a diary or a text message, the quote gets written on a pad or a spreadsheet, the parts go on a supplier receipt, and the invoice is raised in a separate tool once the car is back with the customer. Then someone has to chase the payment and match it to the right job on the bank statement. Each handover is a chance for a detail to go missing.

The problem

Most garages end up with three or four tools that do one job each. A booking app for the diary, an invoicing tool for bills, a spreadsheet for expenses, and a bank account that shows money arriving without saying which job it paid for. Each one might be cheap on its own. Together they cost you time, and the time adds up in the evenings when you are trying to work out whether the Fiesta in bay two has been paid for.

The mismatches are the real trouble. The quote said £340, the invoice says £385 because an extra part was added on the day, and the customer has paid £340 by bank transfer. Nobody has made a mistake on purpose, but when the figures live in different places, nobody can see the whole picture quickly.

The cost of tools is another issue. Many systems charge per user, so every new member of staff adds to the monthly bill. A two-person workshop and a six-person workshop can end up paying very different amounts for the same work. If you want one subscription for the whole business, you need software built that way from the start.

How it works

BizHub365 keeps customers, bookings, invoices and payments in one system, so a car repair job can move from first contact to paid without being retyped. It is UK software, and it is aimed at businesses with about one to twenty people, including garages, small workshops and sole traders who currently juggle a booking app, an invoicing tool and payroll.

Here is the flow in practice.

Customers sit in a CRM with contact details, notes and tags. For a garage, you might record the registration, the last service date or a note about a previous fault. Notes stay with the customer, so the next visit starts with the history in front of you.

The booking diary holds your jobs and your opening hours. You can set holiday closures, and the diary can sync with Google or Microsoft calendars through iCal, so your own calendar shows the bays you have booked. Customers can book themselves in, and those bookings land in the same diary you use for everything else.

When a customer asks what a repair will cost, you create a quote from the same record. If they agree, the quote becomes an invoice without retyping the lines. If the job grows on the day, you add the extra part to the invoice, and the quote and invoice still share the same customer and job history.

When payment arrives, you record it against the invoice. You can also import your bank feed. Smart matching then suggests which bank lines pay which invoices, so you are confirming matches rather than searching through statements. Credit notes and expenses, including parts receipts, sit in the same system, so the money side of each job is visible in one place.

If you employ staff, PAYE payroll runs from the same employee records, with RTI submissions (FPS and EPS) prepared from the owner's side of the business. You do not need a separate payroll tool to pay the mechanic who works Saturdays.

Your accountant or bookkeeper can work from the same records. Rather than sending you a box of receipts at year end, they can see invoices, payments and expenses as they stand. Whether that suits your arrangement depends on how you already work together, but the figures are not split across several places.

Getting started

The quickest way to find out whether this fits your garage is to try it on your own work. The free trial runs for 14 days. You add your card at sign-up, and if you cancel before the trial ends, you are not charged. After the trial, the price is £29 a month for BizHub365 One, which covers unlimited team members, with one subscription for the whole business.

A sensible first week looks like this:

1. Add your business details, opening hours and holiday closures so the diary reflects how you actually work.
2. Bring in your customers. If you already use Sage, QuickBooks or FreeAgent, you can import from them. Otherwise, start with the customers you see most often and add the rest as they come in.
3. Set up your first quote and invoice for a typical job, such as a service or an MOT-related repair, so the lines and wording are right before a real customer sees them.
4. Record one real payment and run a bank import, so you can see how matching works with your own bank.
5. Ask your accountant or bookkeeper whether they would like access, and agree how you will share the records going forward.

If the first week shows that the diary, quotes, invoices and payments hang together the way you need them to, carry on. If it does not, you have lost nothing but a few hours. You can start your free 14-day trial and set up your garage in the same system you will use for the next job.

Car repair is hard enough without fighting your own software. Keep the job, the quote, the invoice and the payment in one place, and the paperwork is much easier to live with.

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