The tour
One Tuesday morning, from three sides.
Three people are going to use this software and only one of them works for you. So rather than a feature list, here is a single repair order — a 2018 Camry with an oil leak — walked through all three: the technician who finds it, the customer who decides about it, and the owner watching the whole shop while it happens.
Every screen below is the product’s own components rendered on this page, not a screenshot. The shop, the cars and the people are invented. Nothing else is.
Prefer to drive it yourself? Open the demo shop — no signup, no card, no email address. You land in a service advisor’s seat in an invented six-bay shop with a year of history behind it.
Delete anything you like: it rebuilds itself at five past every hour. Texts, emails and webhooks refuse to send and tell you why, so nothing you press reaches a real person.
The technician — It starts in the bay, on a tablet, with gloves on.
Sam has the Camry on the rack and a courtesy inspection open. He is not typing prices and he is not deciding what to sell — he is rating sixteen things and writing down what he sees. Everything the customer reads an hour later starts as one of these rows.
Bay density
The screen gets bigger because the room is different.
A technician at a cart screen is about a foot and a half further from the glass than an advisor at a counter, so Torqix ships a third density that scales type, row height and touch targets together as one step. This frame is drawn in it. Compare it with the customer’s estimate further down the page — same components, same tokens, different room.
A rating is one tap of four: OK, Soon, Now, N/A. Anything a technician wants to say beyond that goes in the note, in his own words — there are no millimetre boxes to fill in, because the product has no measurement field and we would rather show you that than draw one.
There is no Make job button on this screen and that is the permission model, not an omission. Turning a finding into a line somebody will be charged for is the advisor’s act, and a technician does not hold the key for it.
Inspection · 2018 Toyota Camry
Playground Motors · sample data
Courtesy inspection
RO-1042
2018 Toyota Camry · Sam Delgado
- 11 ok
- 2 soon
- 1 now
- 1 to go
Tires & brakes
Tire tread depth & wear pattern
greenTire pressures (set to placard)
greenFront brakes
yellow4 mm left on the fronts. Not urgent — a couple of months.
Rear brakes
green
Under car
Fluid leaks
redValve cover gasket seeping onto the exhaust manifold.
Steering & suspension
greenExhaust system
1 item still to rate.
The clock
Time lands on the job, or it lands nowhere.
Punches attach to a job, so two technicians can be on one ticket and the ticket knows. It also means the clock is the input to three other screens: your effective labor rate, whether a job made money, and whether a car is going to make its promised time.
The third row is the honest one. Time that nobody attributed to a job is labelled Shop time — no job rather than hidden, because that is most of what a real clock records and a demo without it is a demo of a shop where nobody ever sweeps up.
Time clock
Playground Motors · sample data
Time clock
3 on the clock now
Sam Delgado
#1042 · Courtesy inspection — 2018 Toyota Camry
On the clock since 8:42 AM
1.20 hopenDana Whitcombe
#1037 · Head gasket — 2015 Subaru Outback
On the clock since 8:34 AM
1.33 hopenRuth Oyelaran
Shop time — no job
On the clock since 7:58 AM
1.80 hopen
Open time is not counted in totals until the punch closes.
The customer — Grace is in a grocery aisle when the text arrives.
This is the half of your software your customers actually judge you on, and most shop owners have never seen what their current system sends out. So here is the whole of it: the thread, and the page that opens from it.
Texting
A conversation, with the automatic message inside it.
The estimate’s send lands in the same thread the advisor is typing in, marked as sent by the estimate rather than typed by a person. Products that keep automated sends in a separate log leave the advisor unable to see what the customer actually received, which is how two people end up talking past each other about a car.
Grace asks whether the brakes have to be today and is told no. That exchange is the product working, and it is the reason the next screen shows something declined.
Messages · Grace Okafor
Playground Motors · sample data
Hi Grace — the Camry's up on the rack. Sending the estimate over now, it's $684.50 and you can approve or decline each line.
Playground Motors9:14 AM
Estimate RO-1042 — $684.50. Tap to review.
Playground Motors9:14 AMsent by the estimate
Got it. Do the brakes have to be today?
Grace9:31 AM
No — the fronts have about 4mm left, so you've got a couple months. I'd do the leak now and the brakes at the next oil change.
Playground Motors9:33 AM
Perfect. Approving just the leak then. Thank you!
Grace9:36 AM
Write a message…
The estimate
Line by line, on a phone, including the word no.
Sam’s red finding is the top line and Grace has approved it. His yellow one is the brakes, and she has declined those — which is a real state with a date and a reason on it, not an error, and it is what puts the job on the follow-up list instead of in a drawer.
The running total counts only what she has agreed to so far. A customer deciding line by line needs to watch the number they are actually saying yes to move.
What the customer opens
Playground Motors · sample data
Estimate RO-1042
2018 Toyota Camry
for Grace Okafor
Valve cover gasket — leaking
$428.00Seeping onto the exhaust manifold — that is the smell after a highway run.
ApprovedFront brake pads & rotors
$386.004mm left on the fronts. Not urgent — a couple of months at your mileage.
DeclinedCabin air filter
$49.00Original filter, visibly loaded.
Waiting on you
Approved so far
Declined work is saved, not deleted.
The owner — You are watching all of it at once.
Three screens, in the order you would look at them: where every car is, which promises are about to break, and whether the month is working.
The board
A list of reasons, not a list of cars.
Every card carries the one line that explains why it is sitting where it is — waiting on a compressor, approved from his phone at 7:52, texted at 2:10. Strip those and a board is just a kanban screenshot.
Grace’s Camry is in Estimates. The Odyssey in Parts hold is the one that is going to cost you a phone call.
The board
Playground Motors · sample data
Estimates
2
RO-1042
Grace Okafor
2018 Toyota Camry
Sent 40 minutes ago. Not opened yet.
Sent$684.50RO-1046
Theo Lindqvist
2021 Toyota RAV4
Draft$312.00
In progress
2
RO-1037
Marcus Whitfield
2015 Subaru Outback
Dana clocked on 1h 20m ago.
In progress$892.00RO-1039
Miguel Santos
2015 Ford F-150
Approved from his phone at 7:52 this morning.
In progress$1,240.00
Parts hold
1
RO-1031
Harriet Nguyen
2013 Honda Odyssey
Compressor is 2 days out. Customer told Tuesday.
Parts hold$1,455.00
Ready
1
RO-1028
Rosa Camacho
2017 RAM 1500
Texted at 2:10. Picking up after work.
Ready$473.80
Promised times
Including the two answers that are “I cannot tell”.
A car is late, at risk, on track, unknown, or not forecastable — and the software will tell you which, in a sentence, from five signals: the promise, the approval, a parts hold, whether anybody has started, and whether the remaining work fits in the time left.
Two of those five words are admissions. Unknown means a signal it needs is missing, usually because nobody promised the customer anything. The em dash on the finished car means we do not track on-time performance at all — that number does not exist in this product, and a page that quietly omitted the row would be implying it did.
Promised times
Playground Motors · sample data
Promised times
- 1 late
- 1 at risk
- 1 with no promise
Miguel Santos
RO-1039
2015 Ford F-150
Was due 11:00 AM
The promised time has passed and the car is not ready.
lateHarriet Nguyen
RO-1031
2013 Honda Odyssey
Promised Tue, Aug 18 at 5:00 PM
Waiting on parts with less than a working day to the promise.
at riskMarcus Whitfield
RO-1037
2015 Subaru Outback
Promised today at 4:00 PM
About 2 h 15 m of work left — it fits.
on trackTheo Lindqvist
RO-1046
2021 Toyota RAV4
No promised time
Nobody has promised this customer anything yet.
unknownRosa Camacho
RO-1028
2017 RAM 1500
Picked up 2:40 PM
on-time not tracked
—
The numbers
On every plan, including the cheapest one.
Car count, average ticket, effective labor rate, and what is sitting unapproved with the age of the oldest one. The owner paying the smallest bill is the one who most needs to know whether the month worked, and that is the usual reason this screen is on somebody’s top tier.
The gauge is the logo doing its job: the Torqix mark is a tachometer, and the needle here is driven by how many of your bays are turning.
Today, at a glance
Playground Motors · sample data
Bays busy right now
78%
Four bays, three of them turning.
Cars in today
14
2vs. the daily average
9 out, 5 still here
Average ticket
$682.15
$41vs. last month
month to date
Effective labor rate
$142/hr
$4vs. last month
billed hours ÷ clocked hours
Waiting on approval
6
1since yesterday
oldest is 2 days
The concrete difference
Chasing the work you already quoted is not an add-on.
When Grace declined the brakes, that job went onto a follow-up list with a date on it. Service reminders and review requests work the same way. All three are in the base product — there is no tier, no module and no upgrade in front of any of them.
Shopmonkey packages this kind of thing as a CRM add-on. On 11 August 2026 we opened their review manager inside a live tenant and it was locked behind “Buy CRM for $349.99/mo” — roughly the price of a whole shop-management product, to ask a happy customer for a review. That is one screen and we are describing only that screen, because it is the one we have a dated screenshot of. Their pricing is theirs to change and we would rather you checked it than took our word for it.
Here is the part we will not dress up, because you would find it out on day one and think we had hidden it: Torqix builds the list and writes the text. A human presses send. Nothing in this product texts a customer on its own, on purpose — an automatic “time for service!” that fires at somebody whose car was written off last month is exactly the machine speaking for the shop that this was built to avoid. If what you want is unattended outbound marketing, we do not sell it and we are not going to.
Straight answer
What it cannot do yet.
This is the list our own help centre keeps, in the same words, checked against the running product by a human on a date. It is here because you are going to find all of it out in week two anyway, and a demo that implies otherwise turns into a support ticket and a refund.
- No card processing, anywhere
- No terminal, no card on file, no online payment, and no way for a customer to pay through the portal. You take money however you take it now and record what happened. Recording it is free and always will be.
- Nothing goes to a customer on its own
- The approval link, the invoice, the reminder, the review ask — every one of them is drafted for you and waits for somebody to press send. The single exception is the after-hours auto-reply, which is off until an owner arms it.
- No on-time figure
- The board flags Late and At risk while a car is live, and that is where it stops. Nothing adds up how often you hit the promise, so a finished car reads an em dash whether it went out early or three hours late.
- Your shop name has no editor
- The shop name is set on signup and cannot be changed in the product. Timezone is different: Schedule settings edits it only after showing the appointments the change would put outside hours or over capacity.
- Your billing currency has no editor
- Billing currency is chosen at signup and cannot be changed in the product. The database also refuses to relabel it once the shop has a labor rate or money history, because old cents must keep the currency they meant. Shop name and address are editable in Shop profile; Schedule settings edits the timezone only after showing the appointments the change would put outside hours or over capacity.
- Plate lookup is dark unless you bring a provider
- No lookup service is wired up by default. You type the plate, the year, the make and the model, or you scan the VIN.
- CSV and Shopmonkey imports cover different records
- CSV brings customers, vehicles, read-only service history and parts. Shopmonkey has a separate direct pull for customers, vehicles, appointments, estimates and order history, including an owner-armed recurring path. Neither route brings photos, invoices, payments, inspections or message history. Tekmetric and Mitchell 1 have no connector.
- Texting consent never imports
- Every number arrives without permission to text it, whatever your old system said, and your shop asks again per number. That is deliberate and it will not be changed.
- Trial expiry is a readable state
- Every page carries the days left and the billing screen explains the boundary. The clock is deliberately feature-flagged: its first armed pass records notice, and a later pass makes an expired shop read-only without blocking its current export. Nothing charges and there is no card field.
The rest of it is your cars.
A tour can show you the software. It cannot tell you how it feels with your customers and your history in it. Signup takes no card and records a date fourteen days out; expiry is not armed. The export button works from the first day in case you decide against us.