Your first repair order, end to end

Work starts with New estimate on the board, the top-bar quick-create menu or Ctrl+K. Every one opens /estimates/new, where you choose or add the customer and vehicle without detouring through the customer list. The path is still customer → vehicle → estimate; it now happens in one setup.

1. The customer

Customers → New customer. Start with name, company, phone, email and notes. A name is optional, and that is a decision rather than a gap: a night-drop car can be booked in with nothing but a plate, and the record saves as New customer and is found by its vehicle until you have a name to put on it. Inventing one to get past the form is how a shop ends up with forty customers called Unknown.

The same form now saves the whole customer record, not just the identity: up to six addresses, preferred contact method and preferred language, fleet and tax exempt status, DOT number, referral source and tags. When you tick Tax exempt, add the reason and, when one exists, the certificate identifier beside it. Torqix freezes that evidence onto the order, estimate and invoice, so a later customer edit does not rewrite old paperwork. The rest is optional, and none of it adds the car — that is still the next step.

There are two consent boxes and they do not mean the same thing. The tick marked Customer agreed to receive texts at this number (consent is tracked per number) is the one field worth being fussy about — without it Torqix will not text that number, and it is recorded per number rather than per person. The tick marked Customer agreed to receive marketing email at this address (estimates and invoices are sent either way) is marketing consent for that address and nothing more: leaving it blank does not hold up an estimate, an approval or an invoice, because those are transactional and go out either way.

Leaving a consent box unticked records "not asked", not "refused". A customer who actually says no is withdrawn from their own record afterwards, which is a different act and is stored as one.

Phones and emails are checked against your existing customers as you go. If it finds a possible match, the button changes to Create anyway so you have to mean it.

2. The car

You land on the customer's page. The car is added there, under Add vehicle, in one box: Enter License Plate, VIN, or Year/Make/Model. It asks your own records first, so a car you have seen before comes back as that car with a link to it rather than as a new one. Enter Vehicle Manually opens the fields — year, make, model, sub model, VIN, plate and type — and Scan VIN barcode will read a VIN off the door jamb with the camera; it fills the box and nothing more.

Under the box, Show license plate results for names the state a plate would be looked up in. If a plate provider is connected, Look up this plate appears in the result itself and answers there — you do not leave the card. Each candidate carries a match percentage, its engine, the registration window it is claiming, and where it came from, in words. Use this vehicle fills the form; it never submits it, and you can edit anything before you press Add vehicle. Candidates it threw out are shown with the reason rather than hidden, because a silent rejection reads as "no such car". The whole box has its own page: Finding a car by plate, VIN or year, make and model.

3. The estimate

From a customer record, each vehicle still has Start estimate. From anywhere else, use New estimate and choose or add both records in the setup. Its optional First concern carries the customer's words onto the first service when you press Start estimate. Add jobs, labour and parts on the ticket; the labour rate and the tax rates were copied onto the order when it was created, so changing them in settings later will not move this one.

The order the lines read in is yours to set. Open a labor or part line's row menu to find Move up and Move down. Moving a line moves it on the customer's estimate and invoice too — both read the same order this screen does. An estimate you have already sent is a frozen copy and does not change.

For a walk-in price with no car and no commitment, use Quotes instead. A quote has its own numbering and turns into a real order with Convert to repair order when the customer says yes.

To take a part back off, open its row menu and choose Remove part line. A part issued from the shelf is put back through a new stock movement; its original movement is never erased. A draft purchase-order link is detached. A part on an ordered purchase order that has not arrived stays until you cancel that order, because the order would still bring it. Once the vendor has delivered it, the part is in your building and the removal puts it on your shelf as stock, at the cost it was bought at — keep it, or send it back to the vendor from the part's own page. A quoted core charge leaves with the part, but an invoiced core deposit stays on its issued document and must follow the core-return and refund path.

4. Getting it approved

Send for approval emails the estimate to the customer and shows you the link to their approval page at the same time. Both, every time — so if the email cannot go (no address on file, an address that has bounced, or a shop whose mail is not set up yet) you still have a link in your hand to text them, and the banner says which happened. Send, beside it, opens the same send behind a panel where you compose it: text, email or both where the customer has a consented mobile and a working address, which address and which number, the subject, and your own message for this customer — starting from one of the shop's templates if you have written any. A number without texting consent is not offered and cannot be texted.

The panel also decides what the customer's page will offer, and those answers stick to THAT link. Whether the inspection findings ride along, whether a signature is asked for, whether the page shows your conversation and what they have already authorized. Change a shop setting next week and the link you already sent keeps behaving the way the panel described it — which is the point, because a customer was told what to expect. Links inside the shown conversation are stripped back to the site they pointed at, so an older estimate's signing link can never travel on a newer one.

Reminders are on the same panel and in the same price: pick up to three days to chase an unanswered estimate and each nudge goes out at nine in the morning, your time, on the channels the send used and through the same consent gate. Approving, declining, sending a newer version or the car simply coming in ends the chase in the same moment — nobody is asked to approve something they already answered.

The link works for fourteen days and is used up by signing. Sending again makes a NEW version and retires the previous link, so a customer holding an older email cannot approve prices you have since changed — they get a page telling them to look for the newer message. The link is only shown for a few minutes after the send, on that ticket; reload later and it is gone, and the way to get another is to send again.

On their side they get each job with Approve or Not this time, type their name, and press Submit approval. Back on the order you then see who signed, when, against which version of the estimate, and how many jobs they took. Declined jobs are not lost — they become follow-ups.

5. Through the shop

The order moves one step at a time and the button says where it is going: → In progress, → Ready. The ordinary route uses ten statuses: Estimate, Approved, In progress, QC, Ready, Invoiced, Paid, Closed, Declined and No-show. The board has six stage lanes: Estimate, Approved, In progress, QC, Ready and Invoiced. An older ticket may still show Parts hold; its only move is back to In progress. New parts waits are a flag on a card in its real stage. Paid and closed leave the board, which is the point of them.

QC can bounce a car back to in progress. If you have set a QC checklist in shop settings, the → Ready button is replaced by the checklist itself, and a manager who wants past it types a reason that goes in the audit trail with their name.

6. Invoice and payment

The order rail's Payment terms row says which terms the invoice will be issued on, and where they came from: this repair order, the customer's account, or the shop default. Change it here and only this repair order moves — the account keeps the terms it had. The due date is worked out once, when the invoice is issued, and frozen on the document, so editing a term afterwards never moves an invoice you have already sent. Once the invoice exists the row stops being a picker and says what is frozen on it.

From Ready, the button in the money bar reads Issue invoice. After that it reads Record payment, and once the balance is clear it is a pill reading Paid.

A new shop starts with five payment methods — Cash, Check, Card, Financing and Other — and that is a starting point rather than the list. Add your own on Settings › Payment types: name the tender the way your shop says it, say whether it counts as cash in the drawer, and press Add type. Types can be renamed, reordered and retired, and the only refusal is retiring the last active one. Tips are recorded separately and never folded into the balance. Payments are append-only: a mistake is corrected with a refund line, with a reason, not by editing history.