REPAIR ORDER TEMPLATE

Why three C’s and not one paragraph

Complaint, cause, correction separate three different kinds of claim. The complaint is the customer’s — you record it in their words even when the words are wrong, because “it makes a noise like a coin in a dryer” is evidence and “bad wheel bearing” is a conclusion. The cause is yours, and it should carry a measurement: pads at 2 mm, rotor at 20.4 mm against a 22 mm discard. The correction is what you did, in the past tense, part by part.

Written that way, a warranty claim eighteen months later is answerable from the sheet. Pair it with a written parts and labor warranty so the customer knows what that claim covers. Written as “customer says brakes bad — did brakes”, it is not.

The declined column

The fourth block is the one most shops leave off, and it is the one that matters when a part you flagged fails. If you told the customer the rear pads were at 5 mm and they said not today, that belongs on the sheet with their initials. It is not a sales record. It is a record of what you told them and when.

The message that gets the second signature

Added work stalls because nobody wants to make the call. Send the same three things every time — what you found, what it costs, and what happens if it waits — and most customers answer inside a few minutes. Copy this, fill in the four blanks, and keep the reply: a text saying “go ahead” is a recorded authorisation of the kind the second signature line is asking for.

Numbering repair orders

The header on this sheet prints RO-YY plus the day of year — the same number the navigation bar shows, derived from the date rather than stored. That is a demo convention, not a recommendation: a real shop wants a monotonically increasing sequence that never repeats, because the RO number is the key everything else hangs on — the invoice, the parts order, the warranty claim, the tech’s flat-rate ticket. On the floor it is also the number on the parts bin; see a staging bin for every RO.

If you are choosing shop software, how it numbers and searches repair orders is worth more than most of the feature list. The software comparison covers what the majors actually do here.

Turning the RO into money

The RO holds no prices on purpose — it is the work record. Price it on the estimate calculator, using book time from a labor guide and a door rate you derived rather than copied from the shop down the road. If your effective labor rate is drifting well under your posted rate, the answer is usually visible on the ROs: hours worked that never made it onto a line.