Quoting and Booking Without the Phone Tag

Where the Hours Go Today

Here is an example week at a small shop that quotes by phone.

• Monday. The service writer finds a worn belt during an oil change. She calls the customer three times before lunch. The car sits on the lift the whole time.
• Tuesday. A customer says he never approved the extra work. There is no record, only a memory of a phone call.
• Wednesday. Two techs show up for the same job because the paper schedule and the whiteboard disagree.
• Thursday. A quote gets written on the back of a work order and lost.
• Friday. The owner stays late to type up quotes he talked through all week.

Every one of those is a wait. The bay waits for the customer. The customer waits for a callback. The owner waits until everyone goes home to do the paperwork.

What We Run Instead

You build the quote once in Shop Desk. The customer gets a text with a link. They open it and see the work in plain words, with what it costs and why it is needed. They approve the quote from their phone.

The approval is saved with the time and the quote they saw. If a question ever comes up later, you have the record. Nobody has to remember a phone call.

Once the work is approved, the job goes on the schedule. Everyone on the team sees the same schedule, on the counter screen, a phone or a tablet in the bay. When a tech finishes, the next job is already there.

If your customers book online, the booking goes into the same schedule. No second calendar to copy from.

For RV repair, RV Shop Desk works the same way, with the fields an RV shop needs.

The Stack Underneath

Shop Desk is not a demo. It runs Supercanic, a working auto repair shop, every day. The quote screens and approval links you get are the ones that shop uses with its own customers at its own counter. The Shop Desk build page shows how it came together.

Under the screens:

• Postgres with row level security. Each shop only sees its own customers and jobs. The database enforces that, not just the screen. See Postgres and row level security.
• App hosting on Railway. The app runs on Railway so it stays up and updates without an install on your computers. See app hosting on Railway.
• Text delivery through your phone line. Quote links go out on the same number your customers already know.

We test saves by saving, not by reading the code. A form that says "saved" and saves nothing is a real failure we have seen and now check for.

A Quote From the Customer's Side

Here is what it is like to get a quote, from the phone of an example customer.

Her car is on the lift for brakes. The tech finds a leaking hose too. The service writer adds both to the quote and sends it. Her phone buzzes with a text from the shop's number. It says the quote is ready and has one link.

She opens it at her desk. The brakes are listed first, with a short note on why they need doing and the price. The hose is next, with its own note and price. The total is at the bottom.

She reads it over and approves the quote from her phone. The shop sees it right away and the tech gets to work. If she had wanted to skip the hose for now, she could reply to the text and the service writer would send a new quote.

Nobody called her. Nobody waited on hold. She did not have to picture a part she has never seen, because the note told her what it does.

If she had a question, she could reply to the text. That reply goes to the service writer, not to a bot.

What Switching It On Looks Like

• Hour 1. We talk through how you quote today. What do you charge for labor? Which parts do you mark up? Who approves what?
• Hour 2. We set up your shop in Shop Desk with your name, hours, labor rate and team.
• Hour 3. We bring in your customer list if you have one. We set up your common jobs so quotes are quick to build.
• Hour 4. We connect your phone line so quote links go out from your number.
• Hour 5. We send a test quote to your own phone. You approve it. We check the record and the schedule.
• Hour 6. We walk your team through the counter screen and the bay view. Then you start using it on real jobs.

What We Will Not Promise

We will not promise that every customer approves by text. Some people still want to talk. Your team can call them, and the quote is still there to walk through.

We will not set prices for you. The labor rate, the markup and the lines on each quote are yours. Shop Desk makes them fast to write. It does not decide them.

We will not move your old records without checking them first. If your current software exports clean data, we bring it in. If it does not, we tell you what we can bring and what we cannot before we start.

If you already use shop software you like, we can work around it instead. We tell you honestly on the first call whether switching is worth your time.

Once the job is done, the next step is getting paid. See getting paid.