How Fullbay Makes Repair Estimates Faster and More Accurate

Some things are just better when they’re made by hand. Take cookies, for example. Sure, store-bought cookies are good enough in a pinch. But if you compare a box of Chips Ahoy! to a batch of chocolate chip cookies that just came out of the oven…well, there’s no contest.

Still, that doesn’t mean everything in your life should be made from scratch. When heavy-duty shops use manual estimates, their employees waste time they could have spent completing jobs (and making money). Plus, human data entry usually leads to human error — meaning these estimates could come with unexpected consequences.

If you’re struggling with estimates at your heavy-duty repair shop, repair estimate software is the solution you’re looking for. With the help of Fullbay, your team can unlock new levels of accuracy and speed while preparing estimates.

Why Preparing Estimates the Right Way Matters

Have you given much thought to your shop’s approach to estimate preparation lately? If this process isn’t where it should be, you could run into problems with:

Profitability

When your shop can’t deliver accurate estimates for its services, your margins will pay the price. Well…you’ll pay the price, and that price will cut into your margins. You get what we’re trying to say here, right?

Let’s use an example: say you’ve given a customer a $2,000 quote for your services. But then, this job ends up requiring more labor and parts than you thought, so it actually costs $2,300 as a result. That means you’ll lose $300 on this job, and if you keep making similar mistakes, your losses will add up fast.

Efficiency

In the heavy-duty repair world, “manual” might as well be a synonym for “inefficient.” That’s definitely the case for manual estimates, at least. Expecting your workers to create estimates can slow down your approval process, result in inconsistent pricing, and even contribute to missed charges.

Trust

Repair shops live or die on their relationships with customers, especially when these businesses are responsible for maintaining fleets. A pattern of inaccurate estimates can erode your clients’ trust, putting these relationships at risk.

The Benefits of Choosing Fullbay for Estimating

To avoid risks like these, you’ll need to find a new approach to estimate creation. Using Fullbay at your shop can help, since our software makes workflow management easier than ever for repair shop owners and fleet maintenance directors. You’ll get control over estimating, service order creation, invoicing, and more. 

When you start using Fullbay at your heavy-duty repair shop, repair estimate software will help you overcome challenges like:

• Inconsistent labor calculations. Labor times play a big role in the estimate creation process, and Fullbay will give you numbers you can trust.
• Out-of-date parts pricing. You won’t have to worry about getting the wrong prices for your shop’s parts while using Fullbay, either. Instead, you’ll know exactly what your inventory costs look like at all times.
• Estimate approval delays. Are your estimates stuck in limbo while you wait for approval? Our software makes it easier for customers to OK their estimates.
• Other inefficiencies. With Fullaby, you’ll never lose valuable time to double data entry and tedious paperwork. 

What Powers Fullbay’s Repair Estimate Software?

Fullbay goes beyond “standard” estimating by adding automation and real-time data to the mix. The three Fullbay components that make this software your best choice for estimates are:

1. Maintenance request generation
2. Labor time guide integration
3. Inventory management capabilities

Let’s take a closer look at these features.

1. Maintenance Request Creation

With our maintenance tracking software, your shop can auto-generate service requests for PMs, DOT inspections, and any other work a vehicle needs. Then you can convert these requests into ready-to-approve estimates, making double entry a thing of the past.

As you might expect, these features can help your shop’s workflow move faster than ever before. Between that and Fullbay’s official heavy-duty maintenance checklist, you’ll practically eliminate the risk of techs missing crucial steps during inspections.

2. Labor Time Guides

When you start using Fullbay at your shop, you won’t be limited to our software’s out-of-the-box capabilities. Fullbay’s premium integrations gives users access to powerful new features — such as compatibility with MOTOR and Mitchell 1 ProDemand/TruckSeries.

Our software doesn’t just make it easy to get labor times from these guides, either. You can also customize your shop’s labor rate by job type, tech, or customer.

And if that still wasn’t enough, Fullbay comes with full clock-in/clock-out tracking to monitor techs’ actual and estimated hours. 

The result: an end to guesswork and a chance to recover unbilled labor.

3. Inventory Management Features

Parts are another big part of heavy-duty shop estimates, so you’ll always want to have up-to-date information on your shop’s inventory. Fullbay gives you a live look at your parts, complete with info on QOH, vendor costs, and markups for every component you might use in a given repair.

While this is a powerful benefit on its own, it’s only scratching the surface of Fullbay’s parts inventory management capabilities. Just like our labor time guides, our inventory features are fully customizable, so you can set advanced pricing rules for individual parts, jobs, and customers. Meanwhile, you’ll get even more information on part availability and pricing through Fullbay Marketplace.

What all this means for you is that you’ll never have to worry about using inaccurate part prices in estimates again. And since you’ll always have details on your shop’s inventory status, you can avoid quoting components you don’t have in stock.

How It All Works Together: The Fullbay Workflow

Now that you know what our fleet maintenance software can do for your shop’s estimate preparation process, it’s time to put it all together. Here’s what the Fullbay workflow (including Fullbay-powered repair estimates) looks like in action:

First, you’ll build a quote for repair or maintenance services. Your workers won’t have to toil over a spreadsheet to do this; instead, Fullbay will use labor time guides, parts data, and PM history to create a highly accurate estimate for the job at hand.

Once this is ready to go, your customer will be able to approve their invoice over email, text, or our customer portal. As you might expect, this is much more efficient than “old-school” approval methods, so your shop should be able to get approval for jobs ASAP. 

When your estimate gets customer approval, you won’t have to spend time retyping data. Instead, Fullbay will automatically convert your estimate to a service order. Our software will also let your clients track repair progress and view notes and images shared by your techs.

Rethink Estimate Creation With Fullbay

Even if “traditional” estimate creation seems good enough for your shop, this can cause more issues than you’d expect. When you rely on manual estimates, you’ll lose out on potential profits, run the risk of damaging customer relationships, and…uh…

…Sorry, is anyone else craving those homemade cookies we mentioned in the intro? We’re almost done with the article, and we still can’t stop thinking about them. This is what we get for blogging before lunch.

Anyway, as soon as you start using it in your heavy-duty repair shop, repair estimate software from Fullbay will give your estimate creation process (and the rest of your workflow) the edge you need to stay competitive. To get started, schedule a demo today!