Chase approvals for extra work

The car is on the hoist, you have found something, and you have sent the customer a price for the extra work. Until they answer, the bay is committed and nothing is being invoiced. The approvals board is about that gap.

It covers the variations raised against your jobs.

Getting there

This screen is not in the sidebar. Reach it from the workshop dashboard or from the Today briefing. The address is /dashboard/quote-approvals.

What it shows

• Pending, how many variations are waiting on a customer right now, with a count of those already more than 24 hours old
• Approval rate over the last 30 days, worked out over the ones that got an answer. Pending and cancelled variations are left out, because counting an unanswered variation as a rejection would make the number meaningless
• Median time to respond, the honest measure of how long your customers take
• Declined with reason, the feedback loop most workshops never build. Read this list monthly; it usually says something consistent about how the extra work is being explained or priced
• 30 day approved value, the money the variations actually brought in

The stale pending block lists the ones rotting, so you know which three calls to make now.

The daily chase email

Once a day we email the workshop a digest of variations that have been pending for more than two days. The threshold is two days rather than one on purpose: 24 hours is today's phone call, 48 hours means it is sitting unread on somebody's phone.

• Variations older than 30 days are left out. They are dead, and including them would bury the live ones. They still appear on the board.
• Your business needs an email address recorded on it.
• If nothing is stale, nothing is sent.

Getting the numbers worth reading

Raise the variation in the system rather than by text message. A variation that only exists as a text will never appear here, and neither will its approval or its value.

A note on the app listing

There is an SMS Quote Approval listing in the App Marketplace at 15 dollars a month. This board is open to every automotive account today, so installing that listing does not switch it on. See which workshop apps are paid.