Integration
Automated estimating inside Protractor
Mechanica works inside Protractor. The tech finishes the inspection, the priced jobs land on the same work order, and the advisor reviews and sends them.
Protractor at a glance
- Connection
- Live today
- Reads
- The completed digital inspection, including every technician finding
- Customer concerns as written on the repair order
- The shop's own canned jobs, labor rate and parts markups
- Writes
- Drafted jobs onto the same repair order the technician was working
- Labor lines carrying published book time for that year, make and engine
- Parts lines carrying the price provenance behind each number
- Vendor
- Protractor
Mechanica works inside Protractor. When the technician finishes the inspection, the priced jobs land on the same work order, and the advisor opens a ticket that is already built.
Key takeaways
- Mechanica works inside Protractor today.
- The trigger is the technician marking the inspection complete.
- Drafted jobs land on the existing work order, priced by the shop's own matrices and markups.
- Nothing reaches a customer without a person sending it.
What does Mechanica do inside Protractor?
A technician finishes the inspection and marks it complete. Mechanica reads the findings and scopes them into jobs. Labor comes from the shop's own canned jobs where one matches, and from published book time where none does. Parts are quoted at the shop's own suppliers and marked up the shop's way. The draft lands on the work order and waits for an advisor.
How does Protractor build a work order?
On the work order, with the lookups and the accounting wired to it. Protractor's own site describes built-in features "such as integrated labour guides and online parts ordering right on to the work order and into payables automatically", and names parts and labor matrices alongside margin thresholds and automated labor bumps.
That is a system built by people who think about margin, and it shows. What the system leaves to a person is the part of the job that sits between a technician's findings and a priced line: somebody reads the inspection, decides which jobs it calls for, pulls the operation time, prices the parts and types the whole thing in. Mechanica drafts that part, and the matrices then do their work on numbers that arrived already sourced.
What does deferred work tracking change?
More than most shops give it credit for. Protractor's material talks about "fast estimating, keeping track of deferred work and prompting the Advisors", which is a real second bite at revenue a shop has already earned.
The catch is that a deferred line is only worth returning to if it carries a real price and a description somebody can read aloud on the phone. Work that got trimmed off a ticket because it was slow to quote leaves behind a stub, and a stub is not a follow-up. A draft that prices everything the findings call for, including the jobs the advisor was never going to have time for, is what makes the deferred list worth working. The declined work entry covers what a usable one looks like.
Why does the accounting side raise the stakes?
Because a bad number travels further in Protractor than it does elsewhere. The site describes an integrated general ledger with receivables and payables, plus tax tracking and banking integration, and parts ordering that posts to payables on its own.
In a system that tightly coupled, a placeholder price becomes a problem in two places at once. So an unpriced part on a draft carries an explicit flag where the dollar amount would sit, and every line names where its number came from. A zero is a figure somebody has to walk back, and with a general ledger underneath they walk it back twice. The needs-pricing flag entry covers the reasoning.
What does setup ask of a shop?
Two things. A Protractor login with the permissions a new advisor would get, and a conversation about how the shop quotes: labor rate, parts markups, canned job library, preferred brands. The second one is the work. Running the canned job audit worksheet first makes that conversation shorter.
On Protractor, the pricing rules are the piece to bring to that conversation. A shop running matrices, margin thresholds and labor bumps has already written down how it turns cost into price, which is further than most shops get and it makes setup faster. Bring the rules as they are configured today. The version somebody remembers and the version the software is running are rarely the same document, and the gap between them is usually money.
One more Protractor-specific note. Shops on this system often carry a long deferred list going back years, and Mechanica does nothing to clean that up. Working it is a phone job for a person, and it is worth doing before you add more to it.
Where should you read next?
The same shortlist usually carries Mitchell 1 and R.O. Writer, and Mechanica works inside both of them too. The integrations hub lists every system it works with. The pricing workflow is in how an estimate gets priced, and the vocabulary is in the glossary.
Sources
Questions shops ask
- Does Mechanica work with Protractor today?
- Yes. The technician finishes the inspection in Protractor, Mechanica drafts the priced estimate on that same work order, and an advisor at the shop reviews it before it goes anywhere.
- Where does the drafted estimate appear?
- On the work order the technician was already working. Drafted jobs belong on that ticket. Put them somewhere else and you have added a copy step between two systems, which is where prices drift.
- Does anything reach the customer automatically?
- No. That rule does not vary by system. Mechanica writes the draft and a person at the shop reviews it and sends it.
- Do our own canned jobs and markups get used?
- Yes. Matching the shop's own pricing setup is what makes a draft read like the shop wrote it, and it is the first thing the setup pass covers.
- How do we get started on Protractor?
- Book a demo and say you run Protractor. Setup is a login with the permissions a new advisor would get, plus a conversation about how the shop quotes: labor rate, parts and labor matrices, canned jobs and preferred brands.
- Protractor already tracks deferred work. Does a draft help there?
- It helps by making the deferred line worth returning to. Protractor's own material talks about keeping track of deferred work and prompting advisors, which only pays off if the deferred job carries a real price and a real description. A job that was trimmed off the ticket because it was slow to quote leaves behind a stub nobody can call a customer about six months later.
- Protractor posts parts to payables automatically. Does that change anything?
- It raises the stakes on the number. Protractor describes online parts ordering that goes onto the work order and into payables automatically, so a price that was wrong on the estimate has a longer tail than it does in a system where accounting is separate. That is one reason every drafted line names its source and an unpriced part carries an explicit flag instead of a zero.
- Do our parts and labor matrices still apply?
- Yes, and applying them is the point. Protractor lists parts and labor matrices alongside margin thresholds and automated labor bumps as built-in features, and those rules are how your shop turns a cost into a price. A draft that ignored them would arrive priced like somebody else's shop, which is the fastest way to make an advisor stop trusting it.
- Does Mechanica touch the accounting side of Protractor?
- No. The scope is the estimate. Mechanica reads the inspection and the shop's pricing setup, writes jobs onto the work order, and leaves the rest of the system alone. The general ledger, payables and parts ordering stay exactly where they are.