Inspections
Digital vehicle inspections with photos, condition ratings, and a health score — done on a tablet, sent by text.
Paper checklists don't sell work. A digital inspection with photos does. Shop Commander's DVI replaces the clipboard with a tablet-friendly checklist your techs fill out in the bay, and turns it into a report your customer actually opens.
Starting an inspection
Click New Inspection, search for the vehicle by year, make, model, or VIN, pick a template, and optionally assign a technician. The inspection lands in that tech's queue and opens ready to fill out. Inspections move through Draft → In Progress → Completed → Sent, and the list is filterable by status and date range.
You build your own templates from reusable modules — see Inspection Builder.
Rating items
Every item gets a one-tap condition: Good (green), Attention (yellow), Urgent (red), or N/A. Items that call for numbers — tread depth, pad thickness, tire pressure — take measurements with units. Critical safety items are flagged automatically.
A timer starts automatically the moment the tech touches the inspection and pauses when they navigate away, so you know what inspections really cost you in labor.
Photos with markup
Attach photos to any item straight from the camera. Before a photo saves, a markup tool lets the tech draw circles, arrows, and text right on it — nothing says "your brakes are done" like a red circle around 2mm of pad. Templates can require photos on every item, or only when it's rated yellow or red.
Notes that read well
Techs write shorthand; customers need plain English. The AI cleanup rewrites tech notes into professional, customer-facing language with one click. The built-in knowledge base also suggests pre-written responses per component and condition, so common findings take zero typing.
Completing and sending
Complete Inspection shows a summary: the automatic 0–100 health score, counts of good/attention/urgent items, and any safety flags. From there, hit Send to text or email the customer their report link, or copy the link to share any way you like. Need to change something after the fact? Reopen it, fix it, and resend.
What the customer sees — the mobile report, engagement tracking, and the request-estimate button — is covered in What Your Customer Sees. Flagged items flow naturally into an estimate on the repair order.