How To Develop A Workshop/Garage Management Software?

Last Updated on January 21, 2022

Today the car industry is rapidly shifting towards the aftermarket industry where every day these car repair shops and garage shop owners are dealing with car lovers who are passionately taking care of their vehicles, and modifying them. And this way slowly and steadily, the car service has gone fully digital.

There are a number of garage management software that rapidly cuts down on admin time and helps to focus more on fixing the car. GMS is a smart car service software that has all the functionalities necessary for day-to-day auto service management process.

What Is An Automotive Garage/Workshop Management Software?

Workshop/Garage Management Software (GMS) happens to be a cloud-based mobile & responsive web app that enables to efficiently manage garage with CMS, which is content management system. It is possible to manage the entire garage system through GMS and even manage the website. Most garages today across the globe are employing this system to efficiently manage the garage job work, invoice, estimate, expenses, profits, income, inventory sell & buys parts and also customer interactions.

Now there are a number of auto repair and garage shops that are using the garage management system but people are constantly looking for the better options. Due to this reason this industry happens to have a lot of investment scope for the businesses and entrepreneurs who can enter in by developing a Garage Management System and offer better and more advanced services than their counterparts.

Things You Can Do With An Automotive Workshop Management Software

The Automotive Garage software absolutely benefits the car owners in many a ways, like it helps in:

• Managing the entire garage bookings and inventories and streamlining the garage operations
• Leveraging regular clients to place orders for home pickup & delivery, hence increasing loyalty
• Offering schemes & discount offers for the regular clients and ensuring customer loyalty
• Orders can also be placed by the customers for car modification on the basis of 3D interface that helps in choosing color, windshield replacement and wheel type configuration.
• Car mechanics can send the automatic car service status and the booking status via the emails and SMS
• Mechanics can offer parts replacement or certain services to the client on the basis of their car history
• Jobs can be assigned by the garage owners and they can also provide rule-based access of system of several garage resources.

What Are The Benefits Of A Garage Management Software?

The GMS can be beneficial in a number of ways, and here we have discussed many of its benefits, like:

• It saves time
• Offers quick turnaround
• Increases profit
• Increases Sales
• Makes customers happy
• Offers ease to the customers
• Increases the loyalty
• Scalable for future

Statistics & Market Size of Automotive Software & Apps

As per automotive industrty statistics:

• The average age of USA vehicle fleet has increased by 17 percent in the last decade.
• The average length of vehicle ownership for the new & used vehicles has went up by 60% in the last decade.
• Around 75% of the aftermarket auto repair is performed by the independent auto repair shops, whereas 25% of businesses lives with the dealerships.
• The aftermarket world has went online and there is a huge change in the marketplace, where the parts as well as the service is being sold online.

What Are The Key Features Of Garage Management Software?

Accounting
This functionality is responsible to record the financial transactions of the garage shop. It stores, sorts, retrieves, summarizes, and presents results in several reports & analysis. Hence, no paperwork is needed and no need to maintain receipts, as everything is digitalized.

Billing & Invoicing
This feature is useful to send out the bills, invoices & estimates to your customers. This makes this process of sending bills and invoices quite hassle-free and quick.

Customer Database
It allows to go fully paperless, where all inspections are auto-compiled to make the work of job management quite simple & efficient from the first quote of completion. The customer database is useful is delivering details & costs to their smartphones and makes everything easy with just one click.

Inventory Control
Having this feature in the app allows to know the inventory situation and have full access to it in real-time. This allows to make quick decisions and makes the whole process smooth.

Labour Rates
The app has all the information in regard of the labour rates so it is easier to make the decisions quickly and get help faster.

Maintenance Scheduling
Every vehicle requires maintenance and having a garage management app allows to easily schedule maintenance so there are no last minute issues.

Parts Management
The parts of all vehicles are required to be managed so that there are no sudden surprises and here this issues can be issues sorted through this parts management functionality that is integrated into the app to make parts management way easier.

Quotes/Estimates
This feature will allow the vehicle owners using garage app to compare the quotes and estimates of one garage with the other garages, in order to fetch the best deals.

Scheduling
This functionality enable the app owners to schedule an appointment in prior to get the vehicle checked or repaired.

Service History
This section of the app will show the service history so the vehicle owners can easily go to the app to check the date when they last got the vehicle checked.

Work Order Management
This feature is useful for the app admin to ensure that the work order is perfectly managed and everything is in order.

Promotion Tools
Every app needs to be promoted and same is the case with Garage management app. Here the app owners to offer several promotional tools, such as vouchers, discounts, coupons, etc., to make the app gain more fame among its target audience.

Push Notifications
This functionality is to keep the app users updated, like when their vehicle is due for maintenance, or part expiry update, upcoming appointment, and a lot of such crucial information.

Live Chat Option
A great feature for an app like this, as Live Chat option will allows the vehicle owners to get easy access to help whenever needed as Live Chat option makes this process a lot easier.

Payment Options
It will be really helpful to Garage management app to have multiple payment options as this will make the entire payment processing very easy and smooth.

Marketing Tools (SMS, Alerts, Mails)
There are a number of marketing tools, like Mails, SMSs, Alerts, which can be integrated into the app to increase its reach to more and more customers.

Advanced Features Of Workshop Management Software

3D Car Configurator
Quite an effective functionality to have for a garage management app, it allows to modify and design your dream car.

Get Quotes
Here the data of the vehicles can be uploaded in order to get quotes.

Quick History
This functionality provides quick history in one single click.

User-based Access
This features provides user-based access to the garage team and mechanics.

Reports
Here the app owners can view several of monthly sales, profits, and other inventory reports.

ZOHO Books
This service is useful to gather the recurring invoices, Profit & Loss (P&L), and real-time reporting.

Live Mechanic Dashboard
This functionality is quite effective as it tells where every vehicle is, what every mechanic is working on, and how much time each and every job is taking.

Customer Loyalty
It is vital for any business or app to win customer loyalty as it is critical for increasing the business revenue. It can be done with automatic service reminder SMS that is sent to the customers.

Create new jobs
The app can easily create jobs in a matter of seconds using the service data and also keep the customers updated with the service status.

CARFAX/VIN Integration
In this feature, the service is recommended to the customers by looking into the history of their individual vehicles.

Track Booking & Jobs
When this feature is integrated into the app, the System dashboard will inform about the crucial aspects of the business when asked.

TecDoc Integration
This functionality allows the app users to place orders for the auto-parts and download all service information on the basis of particular makes & models.

Complete List of Modules In A Workshop Management Software

Also the garage management software will be integrated to Stock Control, HR System, General Ledger, Car Sales System & Car Rental System.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) Tracked Via Automotive Workshop Management Software

How To Develop A Garage Management Software?

As the app is developed, there are three panels that the Garage Management App is based on, like:

Garage Owner Panel
So as the developers are doing the job if creating the app, what they do is for the garage owner, they create a web-based cloud-hosted system from where the garage owner can handle the entire business processing, accept user/reject user requests, manage payments, and do a lot more that is crucial in the handling of garage business. From this cloud-based system, the garage owner can connect with the users as well as mechanic to ensure everything is going on smoothly. Updates can be sent to vehicle owners regarding their cars and a lot more can be handled from here.

User Panel
Then there is a user panel, that is created for the users, so users can download the web/mobile app to connect with the garage center. From here itself the user can make easy payments using multiple payment gateways, and update the garage about the preferences and requirements and get them met in an easy manner.

Mechanic Panel
This is web/mobile app panel created by the development team for the mechanics, so the latter can check about the assigned tasks, pending tasks, upcoming tasks, get in touch with the garage owner as and when needed to either to update about a vehicle that he is working on, or for other crucial aspects.

How Much Does It Cost To Develop A Garage Management Software?

There are several aspects that affect the cost of developing automotive software solutions like garage management system, such as features, location chosen for the development of the software, number of platforms for which the software is being developed, and other crucial aspects that affect the creation cost. However, if we have to give a rough estimate than it takes somewhere around $25000-$35000 to create an app with basic functionalities, and for a single platform, whereas when the software is integrated with advanced functionalities and created for more than one platform, then the cost comes around $50000-$70000.