Your First Day
From empty shop to first paid invoice — set up the shop, add a customer, and write your first repair order.
This is the walkthrough for day one: shop details in, team in, first customer in, first repair order written and paid. Fifteen minutes, start to finish.
Step 1 — Set up your shop
Head to Settings and work left to right through the tabs:
- General — your shop name, address, phone, email, and logo. This is what customers see on every estimate, invoice, and text you send, so get it right first.
- Financial — your default labor rate, parts markup, and tax rate. Every new repair order starts from these numbers.
- Operations — business hours, workflow statuses, and online booking. The defaults work fine for day one; refine later.
The full tour of every tab is in Settings.
Step 2 — Add your team
Open Users and hit Add User for each person: name, username and password, an optional PIN, and a role — Owner, Admin, Manager, Service Writer, Technician, or Parts. Roles control what each person sees, and every action in the shop is tracked to the person who did it.
Details in Users & Roles.
Step 3 — Add your first customer
Go to Customers → New Customer. Name and phone are enough to start — the phone number is what connects texting, approvals, and payment links later.
Then add their vehicle from the customer profile — enter the VIN and hit Decode VIN to fill in year, make, model, and engine automatically.
Step 4 — Write your first repair order
Open Repair Orders → New RO. Search for your customer, pick the vehicle, note the customer's concern, and create it.
In a hurry at the counter? You can create the customer right inside the New RO modal — hit + New Customer without leaving the form.
From the repair order you'll add the actual work:
- Add services — build them line by line, or pull from Canned Jobs once you've saved your common packages.
- Parts and labor price from your Financial defaults automatically.
- Send the estimate — Share → Send Estimate texts the customer a link where they approve or decline each line and sign from their phone. See Estimates & Approvals.
- Do the work — drag the card across the Job Board as it moves through the shop.
- Collect — the Payments tab takes cash, card, e-transfer, or a text-to-pay link. See Payments.
That's the loop
Customer → vehicle → repair order → estimate → approval → work → invoice → payment. Everything else in Shop Commander — inspections, appointments, campaigns, reports — hangs off that loop.
Next: the Job Board, where the whole day lives.