AUTO REPAIR — WHEATON, ILLINOIS
Websites, fleet accounts and service history for auto repair shops in Wheaton, IL.
A retail customer is one car and one bad morning. A commercial account is nine vehicles, a maintenance schedule and an invoice that has to satisfy somebody's bookkeeper.
Twenty minutes. You get a written plan and a price. Nothing starts until you say so.
A commercial account is one contact and a garage full of vehicles.
The person who calls you usually isn't the person who drives the van. She runs the office, she keeps a spreadsheet with plate numbers in it, and what she wants is for six vehicles to be looked after without her having to think about any of them. Every question she asks is really the same question underneath: can I stop tracking this myself.
So the account gets built the way she already thinks about it. One customer record, several vehicles under it, each with its own mileage, its own history and its own next due date, and one contact who gets told what's happening before it happens.
- Vehicles grouped under a business, not scattered across driver names
- Mileage and service intervals recorded per vehicle
- One contact for approvals, whoever ends up dropping the keys
- Invoices addressed to the company, with a reference number if they need one
Contractor trucks and church vans keep somebody else's calendar.
A landscaping trailer can't be off the road in June. A van that carries a congregation on Sunday can sit in your bay all day Tuesday and nobody notices it's gone. Commercial scheduling is mostly knowing which of those you're holding, then booking the work into the week the customer can actually give up.
Online booking that offers real slots, with a reminder before the appointment, means she schedules at nine at night while she's doing the rest of her admin — instead of at ten in the morning while you're already under a hood with your hands full.
The invoice goes to a business, and the business has rules.
Retail customers pay at the counter and drive off. Companies want an invoice with the vehicle on it, terms they recognize and a way to pay that doesn't involve coming back. Some want it monthly, all of them want it consistent, and any shop that has chased a commercial invoice knows the chasing cost more than the discount ever did.
Invoices go out the same day the vehicle leaves, payment happens online or at the counter into one ledger, and what's outstanding becomes a screen instead of a feeling. It feeds the monthly report and syncs to QuickBooks, so the year-end takes an afternoon rather than a weekend.
Service history has to outlive the driver.
Drivers change. The van doesn't. Two years in, somebody new asks whether the timing belt has been done, and the honest answer is sitting in a paper folder that may or may not still be under the counter. A shop that can pull up every job against that plate in four seconds is a shop that keeps the account.
It's also where the next job comes from. A record showing the brake fluid was last changed at forty-one thousand miles is a phone call worth making at sixty-five thousand, and it's the rare call a customer thanks you for.
The call you missed was the one worth the most.
A worried driver will call three shops. A fleet contact calls one, and if nobody picks up she moves down her list and doesn't come back — because what she's buying isn't a repair, it's not having to think about it.
For $100 a month every call gets answered, at nine at night or on a Sunday morning, with what was said and the number to ring back waiting for you before you lock up.
Pricing, with nothing hidden behind a form.
Two plans, and no third one being kept back for bigger shops. Foundation is $250 a month with a one-time $250 setup: the website, the Google Business Profile, email on your own domain and the search work. Growth is $500 a month with a $500 setup and turns on booking synced to your Google Calendar, review requests, the full ledger, automated texts and emails, payments, expenses, monthly reports and the QuickBooks sync.
Add 24/7 phone answering for $100 a month, or automated review replies for $130. Anything unusual is priced to the job and put in writing before it starts.
Open Knox Knocks and put a vehicle through it.
Knox Knocks is a repair shop we built from the domain up. Book a slot, get the confirmation, then look at the record it created. It'll tell you more in four minutes than we could in four paragraphs.
Wheaton is the county seat, so DuPage County's offices at 421 N. County Farm Rd and the 18th Circuit courthouse at 505 N. County Farm Rd sit within a few miles of most bays in town. A place of 53,970 with the county's business running through it puts a lot of weekday miles on vehicles that belong to an organization rather than a household, and County Farm, Geneva, Naperville and Butterfield Roads carry them. Those drivers don't panic-search at seven in the morning. Somebody picks a shop once, writes it on a list, and keeps using it until the paperwork gets irritating.
Every plate, every job, every unpaid invoice, in one place.
A CRM is just the place your customer and vehicle records live. Here it's one account per business, with the vehicles under it and the history under them — approved work, declined work, what got quoted in March and never booked, and what each company still owes. The follow-up calls write themselves off that list. They're also the cheapest work you'll ever sell, because you already did the diagnosis.
Questions people actually ask
Straight answers.
Can you invoice a company rather than the driver?
Yes. The account belongs to the business, the vehicles sit under it, and the invoice goes to the contact who approves the work with the plate and the job on it. They can pay online or at the counter, and either way it lands in the same ledger.
Will the service history stay with the vehicle when the driver changes?
That's the point of recording it against the vehicle instead of the person. New driver, same plate, same history — every job, date and mileage still there when somebody asks what was done and when.
How much does this cost a two-bay shop?
Foundation is $250 a month with a $250 setup and Growth is $500 a month with a $500 setup. Fleet accounts don't cost extra, and a year paid up front comes to $2,550 or $5,100 with the setup billed separately.
Put the demo through its paces first.
Break it if you can. Then open the ledger and see what a fleet account looks like when six vehicles sit under one name.
Tell us what your commercial work looks like.
Bay count, how many business accounts you already run and how you invoice them now is enough for us to give you a straight answer.
A real person reads this and gets back to you within 24 hours. If it's urgent, (331) 291‑7400 rings a phone.