Repair networks
The gap between the estimate and the final invoice is where the margin goes.
Three figures matter on every repair — what was quoted, what was authorised, and what was billed. Most systems record one of them.
Your operation
A vehicle needs repairing. You allocate it to a bodyshop, they estimate, somebody authorises, work happens, and an invoice arrives some weeks later. Between the estimate and that invoice there are usually two or three conversations about supplementary work, at least one of which happened by telephone.
The car is off the road throughout, which matters because something else — a hire vehicle, usually — is accruing charges for exactly as long as the repair takes.
So repair duration is not a repair problem. It is a hire cost, and the two live in different places.
Where it costs you
There is one cost field
So the estimate, the authorisation and the final invoice occupy the same box in sequence, and the variance between them is unrecoverable afterwards.
Supplementary work is agreed verbally
And appears on the invoice as though it had always been in scope, with nothing to check it against.
Nobody knows how long the car has actually been there
Dates in and out are frequently not recorded at all, so repair duration cannot be managed and cannot be challenged.
The repairer is chased by telephone
Repeatedly, by different people, because there is no shared view of what stage the job is at.
Repair delay silently inflates hire
The hire clock runs regardless. If the two are in separate systems, nobody sees the connection until the hire invoice is questioned.
What changes
Three figures, kept apart
Estimate, authorised cost and final cost are three separate fields on the repair. The variance is visible because the numbers were never overwritten.
Dates in and out are part of the record
So repair duration is a number you can report on, challenge and forecast against — rather than something reconstructed from emails.
Repairers work through their own login
They see the jobs they have been allocated and nothing else, and update them where they are. Which removes most of the telephone chasing on both sides.
How the repairer portal works →Repair delay is visible against the hire
Both sit on the same claim, so a repair that has taken eleven weeks and a hire that has accrued for eleven weeks are visibly the same fact.
The engineer's view and the repairer's view are separate
An assessment is not an authorisation. They are recorded separately because they are different decisions made by different people.
What a firm like yours actually runs
Core — repairs, engineering, the claim, documents, invoicing and the pipeline.
- Portals — gives each bodyshop its own scoped login. This is the one that changes the day-to-day.
- Analytics Pro — if repair duration and cost variance by repairer are figures somebody needs to manage.
See it against one of your real claims.
Thirty minutes, no slides. Bring a live file and we will run it through the system end to end.