Automated estimating inside Tekmetric

Mechanica reads a completed Tekmetric inspection and writes the priced jobs back onto the same repair order. The advisor opens the ticket they were going to open anyway. What was an hour of lookups is already there, waiting for a read and a send.

Key takeaways

• The trigger is the technician marking the inspection complete.
• Drafted jobs land on the existing repair order. No second ticket, no second tab.
• The shop's own canned jobs are matched before any labor guide lookup happens.
• Nothing reaches a customer without a person sending it.

What does a Tekmetric day look like right now?

A customer calls in with a noise nobody can place. That goes on the repair order as a concern at intake. The technician takes the vehicle, works through the digital inspection, and writes down what they found.

Then the ticket comes back to the counter and the advisor becomes the bottleneck. Somebody has to read the findings and decide what jobs they call for. The book time for that exact year, make and engine has to be looked up. Parts have to be priced, which means three supplier tabs and a note on a pad. Then all of it gets keyed onto the ticket, line by line, while the phone rings.

The work gets done. It gets done in whatever order was quickest to price, which is how a $2,900 diesel ticket ends up sitting behind a $180 oil change.

Where does the estimate get built in Tekmetric?

On the repair order. Tekmetric holds jobs, labor lines and parts lines on the ticket itself, and what the customer eventually sees is a view of that same record. There is no separate estimating document to reconcile afterward.

That matters for automation, because it decides where a draft has to land. A tool that builds an estimate somewhere else has to push it back, and the push is where numbers change. Mechanica writes onto the ticket, so there is one record of the price and one authorization trail behind it. The comparison of the two shapes covers what the copy step costs.

What changes when the draft is already written?

The technician marks the inspection complete. Mechanica picks the ticket up from there and reads every finding on it, then scopes the jobs those findings call for. Canned jobs get matched first. Anything with no canned job behind it gets published book time for that specific engine. Parts get quoted at the shop's own suppliers and marked up the shop's way.

The advisor opens the ticket and finds the work priced. They accept what they want, reject what they do not, change the wording on anything that needs it, and get on the phone. That is the whole change. The advisor still decides what the customer is told and in what order, which is the part that sells work.

What happens on the tickets that do not fit?

Four ticket shapes have a defined behavior in the engine rather than a guess.

A ticket carrying a customer concern with no technician finding yet gets a diagnosis drafted. Nobody can name the failed part from a complaint, so nothing pretends to.

A ticket where no concern text survived gets its findings reverse-engineered from the job names already on it, and the draft is marked as built from a synthesized concern. The advisor knows the input was thin.

A part that no supplier will quote gets an explicit needs-pricing flag. It never becomes a zero on a customer-facing estimate, because a zero is a number somebody has to walk back.

A ticket that already carries jobs from an earlier visit gets only the missing work drafted. Existing lines are left where they are.

What does setup involve?

Two things, and the second one is the real work.

The first is connecting the shop's Tekmetric account. The second is a pass over how the shop quotes: the labor rate, the parts markup rules, the canned job library, the brands the shop reaches for by default. That conversation is what decides how much of a draft reads like the shop wrote it, so it is worth doing properly. Running the canned job audit worksheet beforehand makes it shorter, because most shops discover their library has entries priced under a labor rate they stopped charging two years ago.

What moves between the two systems, and what does not?

Mechanica reads the completed inspection with every finding on it, the customer concerns as written, the shop's canned jobs, labor rate and markup rules, and the jobs already sitting on the ticket. It writes drafted jobs back, with labor lines carrying published book time for that vehicle and parts lines carrying the source of each number.

Everything else in Tekmetric stays where it is. Payments, the job board, parts ordering, customer records: none of it is touched. The scope is the estimate, and a tool that quietly reaches further than its scope is a tool nobody can audit.

Why does every line carry its source?

Because the first question after a $3,000 estimate is always why. An advisor who has to say "let me check on that" has lost the call.

Open any drafted job and each line names where its number came from. It is one of four things: the shop's own canned job. Published book time for that exact vehicle. A live supplier quote. What the shop has charged for this work before. Lines nobody could price say so plainly. There is no confidence percentage, because a score tells an advisor nothing they can act on. A source and a flag do. More on the sequence in how an estimate gets priced, and the vocabulary sits in the glossary.

Other systems on the roster, with their current status, are on the integrations hub.

Where should you read next?

The same shortlist usually carries Shopmonkey and Shop-Ware. The integrations hub carries the rest of the roster.