Clients and vehicles
The history is in a filing cabinet, or in one technician's head
A returning customer asks what you did last time, and the answer takes ten minutes to find, or leaves with the technician who found it. MecanoPro keeps one record per vehicle that outlives every appointment, and anyone at the counter can open it.
2019 Subaru Outback
Passenger vehicle
- VIN
- 4S4BTAPC0K3000000
- Plate
- ABC 123
- Mileage
- 84,210 Km
- Owner
- Julie Tremblay
- Oct 3 Winter tires on 84,210 Km
- Mar 12 Front brakes 81,950 Km
- Sep 30 Oil change and inspection 78,300 Km
Found on Mar 12, not done: rear tires worn. It is on the record for next time.
What it is costing you
You are paying for the same diagnosis twice
When nobody can see what was found last visit, the technician re-discovers it on your time, and the work nobody remembered to recommend never gets recommended. There is no statistic on this page. Ask your team.
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How many times a week does someone find out something you already knew?
The technician re-discovers it, on your time.
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How long does it take to find a returning customer's last visit?
Ten minutes at the counter, hunting for the file.
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What does that customer think when you cannot answer?
"We will get back to you" is not what a returning customer came for.
One vehicle, from the first visit to the last
Seven moments where the history goes missing, and what the record does at each.
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First visit
A vehicle you have never seen rolls in
Today One wrong character in a VIN and the parts order is wrong. The same vehicle ends up on file twice, under two spellings.
With MecanoPro Type the VIN and MecanoPro checks it against the vehicles already on file as you type. Press Decode VIN and the year, make and model come in for you, along with as much of the rest as the lookup knows.
- A duplicate VIN is worth stopping for. It usually means the vehicle is already here under another client, and a second record splits its history in half for good.
- Decode VIN works for passenger vehicles, motorcycles and heavy trucks. A VIN whose check digit is not valid is flagged, since it was almost certainly typed wrongly.
- Add it from the client, from the Dashboard, or from the appointment you are booking. New vehicle? Add here brings you straight back with it chosen.
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Any vehicle
It is not a car
Today The boat, the snowmobile and the excavator get squeezed into a notes field, and the hours on the engine are typed into a kilometres box.
With MecanoPro Ten vehicle types are first-class, and the form shows the fields that type needs. Mileage is recorded in kilometres, miles or engine hours, so an hour-metered machine keeps a real service history.
- A motorcycle gets the motorcycle models. Everything else gets cars, trucks and SUVs, so a Honda does not list its bikes beside its cars.
- A make or model that is not on the list can be typed in, and a link takes you back to the list.
- Choose the year first and the model list only offers what was made that year.
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The counter
"What did you do last time?"
Today The last brake job is in a folder, the mileage is on a sticky note, and the photos are on someone's phone.
With MecanoPro Every vehicle has a page with a tab for each kind of history. Anyone at the counter opens it and reads the answer before the customer has finished asking.
- Service history shows every visit: with Work Orders, each visit is its work order, with what was done, the mileage and the invoice.
- Mileage history lists each reading and when it was taken, from visits, from the appointment window and from the odometer line of an inspection.
- The vehicle's current mileage only moves forward. An older, lower reading is kept in the history without rewinding it, so a typo cannot turn the odometer back.
- Quotes, invoices and inspections for that vehicle each have their own tab, and an inspection opens as the full record.
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The bay
Before the work starts, photograph it
Today Existing damage becomes your problem the moment nobody photographed it, and "that was not there before" is a conversation you cannot win.
With MecanoPro The Photos tab holds the vehicle's gallery. Drop files in to upload, drag to put them in order, and download the lot as a single zip.
- Photograph the condition on arrival: two minutes with a phone settles every dispute about what was already there.
- Photograph what you found, a worn pad next to a new one, a leak. A customer looking at a photo authorises work that a line on a report does not.
- Photograph work that will be invisible once the vehicle is back together. It answers the question asked six months later.
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Next visit
The thing you found and did not do
Today Every shop notices things it does not fix that day. Without a record, the next visit finds them again from scratch.
With MecanoPro Write it on the vehicle. A shop that does can open with "you remember we mentioned the rear tires", and see whether it was found, and declined, before.
- Record the mileage at every visit, even when nothing else changed. Two readings six months apart turn "the pads are getting low" into "about a year left at this rate".
- Know what a measurement was last time. That is what makes a measurement mean anything.
- A history is only worth what the last person to touch it put in. The cost of leaving the detail at five o'clock lands months later, on somebody else, in front of the customer.
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New owner
The vehicle is sold, or scrapped
Today A vehicle that changed hands gets a second record, and its history is cut in two.
With MecanoPro Change the owner on the record. It is a vehicle that changed hands, not a new vehicle, so its history goes with it.
- When a vehicle is sold, scrapped or left your care, switch its Active badge off rather than deleting it. Its history stays and nothing is lost.
- An inactive vehicle is no longer offered when you book an appointment or approve a request, and it is left out of the vehicle counts on the analytics page.
- The record keeps a history of its own changes: each one, who made it and when.
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Monday
What does the customer base really look like?
Today You do not know which records are missing a VIN, a plate or a photo, which vehicles never came back, or which makes actually pay.
With MecanoPro Analytics reads the vehicles on file and tells you where the records are thin and where the money is.
- Missing information: vehicles with no VIN, no year, no mileage, no plate or no photo, each one click away from the list so you can fix them.
- Average revenue per vehicle by make, for the eight makes most present on file, and the vehicles that brought in the most revenue.
- Vehicles by age and by mileage, and service activity: active with an appointment in the last 12 months, dormant beyond that, or never had one.
Ten kinds of vehicle, each measured its own way
Not a notes field with a car in it. Each type gets the fields it needs, and its mileage in the unit its industry uses.
- Passenger vehicles
- Motorcycles
- Off-road vehicles
- Boats
- Personal watercraft
- Snowmobiles
- Heavy trucks
- Heavy equipment
- Trailers
- RVs
Mileage in KmMiHrs kilometres, miles or engine hours
Where the record needs you
A record is only worth what the last person to touch it put in. Here is what it leaves to you.
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The decoder reads a US database
Decode VIN uses the US NHTSA database, which only holds what manufacturers submitted for the US market. A car sold in Canada or Europe often comes back with very little, or with only the make and year. That does not mean the VIN is wrong. Fill in the rest by hand.
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A duplicate VIN is a stop sign
When MecanoPro warns you that a VIN already exists, stop and look. Search it first, and use the existing record even if it is filed under a different client.
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A record is only as good as the last person to touch it
MecanoPro cannot make anyone write down what they found. It can make it easy, and make it the first thing the next person sees.
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The change history is not an undo
It tells you what a field used to say, who changed it and when, so you can put it back yourself. It does not restore anything for you.
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Photograph with care
Keep documents on the seat and paperwork in the door pocket out of the frame, and be careful with number plates if a photograph might end up anywhere public.
The next time a customer asks "what did you do last time?", you could already know
Send us the spreadsheet, the shoebox or a photo of the customer cards. We build the records before your first day, and you see your own customers on it in the demo.
See it running on your own work orders
Thirty minutes, at a time that suits the shop. We load a few of your real jobs in and you tell us where it would break.