Well-written mechanic work orders help technicians stay on task and efficiently move jobs through to completion. With Tekmetric’s Job Board, mechanic work order templates, and Tech Board, you can craft and manage highly detailed work orders, strategically assign work, and track progress all from one intuitive shop management software.
If you're a service advisor, you probably know the ropes of preparing a work order like the back of your hand: you get the technician to perform an inspection, put together an estimate, get approval for the work, and then prompt the techs to complete the work. And if you’ve read our digital vehicle inspection guide, you know that Tekmetric makes drawing up mechanic work orders that much easier. But what happens when it’s time to assign work, and it seems like all the technicians are already stacked with jobs?
Without the right tools, assigning work evenly across your team of technicians can come with a serious learning curve. Fortunately, Tekmetric can simplify work order creation and job distribution, too. Small details and adjustments intentionally designed into our system can make a big difference in how efficiently the work is completed.
Technicians and service advisors, you know the pace and organization of a shop depends on the efficiency of its work order process. If you don’t know what to do, what to use, and how long you have to complete a job, it’s difficult to fix a car and get it back to the customer on time. And as your shop scales to take on more work, the management challenge increases exponentially. So let’s dive into how to streamline mechanic work orders and get more work done without it seeming like, well, work.
Evenly Distributed Workloads For a More Efficient Workplace
Imagine it’s summer and you come in one sweltering day to a slammed schedule and not enough help. Juggling all that work can be challenging enough with an evenly distributed workload, but when the workload isn’t balanced, work can become downright frustrating.
It can also mean turning away customers.
Ultimately, it’s impossible to sustain and grow a business if keeping up is a struggle and panic sets in when a sudden influx of jobs comes through the shop. Changing up how work orders are drawn up and issued can make a big difference and turn a chaotic workplace into an efficient one.
In a well-balanced workplace, technicians tend to be happier and more efficient at their jobs. The quality of their work goes up, leading to more satisfied customers. Everyone is safer in a well-balanced workplace, too, as they are not constantly required to rush to finish their jobs.
Contrast our example of a garage in chaos with one where each technician knows exactly what tasks are on their plate and how many hours they need to get in, or have left, on a particular job. Now imagine that they also have an easy way to track and communicate their progress to the rest of the team.
With Tekmetric’s work order tools, you can fine-tune your team’s timing and bring order back to your shop.
Generating a Mechanic Work Order on Tekmetric’s Job Board
Exploring the Job Board
Service advisors, get ready to meet your new command center: Tekmetric’s Job Board. The Job Board provides a launching point for creating new work orders and integrates with other aspects of managing mechanic work orders. The Job Board lets you see work order cards under Estimates, Work-In-Progress, and Completed jobs columns. Each job card displayed shows the customer’s name, car description, and estimate.
You can initiate a new work order by clicking “CREATE REPAIR ORDER'' in the upper-right corner of the Job Board. Creating a new repair order will pull up a new repair order form where you can record the details of the new work order. If you’re helping out a customer that has already been in the shop, you can search the customer by name, plate, VIN, email, or phone number to quickly populate their information. If they are a new customer, simply click “ADD NEW CUSTOMER” and gather their information to save into the system.
Inside Tekmetric Mechanic Work Orders
Every new work order starts with an estimate. Service advisors and technicians can collaborate within Tekmetric, leveraging Digital Vehicle Inspections to capture even the most minute details about the vehicle and the reason it's in the shop. Parts and labor time needed can also be documented. If you’re a service advisor, Tekmetric will prompt you to provide details on each job needed for the work order, including labor hours required and a cost-estimate based on what the techs find.
With Tekmetric’s Repair Orders, which function like digital mechanic work order forms, you can say goodbye to the days of guestimates and incomplete work orders. From within the work order, you can send estimates and information to the customer for approval. Once an estimate is approved by the customer, you can begin distributing jobs within a work order to different technicians You’ll also have easy access to car and customer history from each work order.
Tips for writing a useful work order
Be sure to read through the customer’s history and highlight any important details in your notes. In the auto repair world, customer care is just as important as caring for the car itself.
Don’t be afraid to add details to the automotive repair work order template once a job starts. The more information technicians have access to, the better.
Think of the repair order (or digital mechanic work order) as another tool in your toolbox. It’s only useful if you know how to use it. Make sure everyone on your team is trained to use the work order feature.
Write for your audience. If you’re a service advisor, remember that technicians aren’t mind readers, so your shorthand or abbreviations may not make sense to them. The same goes for customers reading your estimates and digital vehicle inspections.
Technicians and Service Advisors—Meet Your New Best Friend: Tekmetric’s Tech Board
If the Job Board is where the work is estimated and tracked, the Tech Board is where the work is divided and completed. Switching to the Tech Board from the Job Board is simple: the icon for Tekmetric’s Tech Board is found directly below the Job Board on the left navigation panel.
Think of the Tech Board as your team’s digital playboard. The Tech Board is a place for everyone to come together and strategize.
If you’re a service advisor or shop foreman, you will act as an account administrator to assign and arrange tasks by job and team member and choose whose accounts to show on the Tech Board at any given time. If you choose to give viewing access to all technicians, your whole team will be able to view all the work assigned across the shop, or you can adjust Tekmetric’s settings to only show each individual their own task list when they login.
Technicians, the Tech Board will let you see exactly what is on your plate at a glance and how many hours you need to put in. It will also show you exactly what jobs to prioritize.
Orienting Workloads with the Tech Board
The Tech Board displays mechanic work order cards divided by columns according to their assignment status. The first column to the left of the interface displays No Tech Assigned jobs, and technicians are represented by separate columns to the right. Each column representing a technician also shows Assigned, Complete, and Incomplete hours, and displays any assigned work order cards. Each card shown on the screen displays information about the customer, the vehicle, and the promised completion date, time, and hours for the work order.
If you’re the service advisor, the wrench in the lower right corner of each card allows you to assign specific jobs within the work order to the technician of your choice. You can assign all of the jobs to one technician or divide the jobs within the work order between multiple techs by clicking the wrench, hovering over individual jobs within the work order, and then clicking on technicians’ names for each job listed.
When you distribute jobs within a work order between multiple technicians, a purple split-arrow icon will appear in the upper left corner of the work order card to indicate multiple technicians are assigned. You can hover over the purple icon to view the names of the technicians assigned to the work order. You can also monitor how many hours a coworker has completed for a specific work order by checking the hours listed at the bottom of each mechanic work order card.
Want to prioritize one job over another? Simply drag and drop the mechanic work order card in question to the top of the column.
The Tech Board integrates seamlessly with the rest of the Tekmetric shop management system as changes made within the Tech Board are automatically reflected across the entire system. Need to make changes to a Repair Order while working from the Tech Board? Just click on the work order card in the Tech Board to open the full repair order.
Tips for Efficiently Distributing Mechanic Work Orders
A poorly balanced workflow introduces unnecessary stress in a workplace. Finding balance with Tekmetric’s Tech Board can help you alleviate stress and streamline the flow of work.
Here are our seven tips for leveraging the Tech Board to create an efficient, well-balanced work environment:
Adjust account settings so that everyone on the team can see who is working what job. This increases transparency and trust and reduces resentment between workers.
Split up jobs within a work order between technicians to provide natural breaks in their day.
Remember that you can always reassign a job or an entire work order. If one technician has a lot of work on their plate, and is nearing a deadline, pull other technicians in to assist by assigning incomplete jobs to any available (or less busy) techs.
Adjust your Tech Board settings to temporarily hide technicians who are on vacation or out sick. This will make seeing who is available to work much easier.
Save time by using the search feature to quickly display who is working on a specific job.
Use the Tech Board in group meetings to strategize and analyze performance. You can also run a variety of reports, from financial to employee to customer and parts reports.
The Tekmetric Difference
Tekmetric’s Tech Board and automotive repair work order templates are designed specifically for the automotive industry and are uniquely suited to help shops stay organized and on task. We are constantly adding new features, too, making life easier for service advisors and technicians like you.
We know your team works hard to get the job done right, and with Tekmetric, you’ll be able to comprehensively document and track mechanic work order details to see repairs through to completion faster than ever, whether you’re logging in from a laptop, tablet, or your phone.
Best of all, our customer service team is always available to help!
Tekmetric just revealed two new tools to help shops win more customers and run a more efficient front desk. Get the full story. Watch the on-demand webinar now.
Generating new business in auto repair is hard. The industry is projected to grow just 2% over inflation annually over the next five years. The average American has 15 auto repair shops within 10 miles of their home, according to Tekmetric's internal data, meaning competition for every new customer is fierce. And across multiple industry surveys, roughly two-thirds of drivers say they don't fully trust their local repair shop — making it that much harder to win them over. The result: only one in 10 shops both grows and hits profit margins of 20% or higher.
"We know the competition to win new customers is fierce,” said Lauren Langston, president and COO, Tekmetric. “That means we need the right strategies and the right tools in order to do it."
Tekmetric's data shows that winning shops consistently focus on four outcomes: car count, average repair order (ARO), driver experience, and cycle time. Two new Tekmetric products — Tekmetric Digital Ads and Tekmetric Phones — are built to move the needle on all four.
Tekmetric Digital Ads
Winning new customers starts with being found. Tekmetric Digital Ads is an AI-powered add on that helps your shop show up where high-intent drivers are already searching for auto repair on Google Maps and Apple Maps. Because it connects directly to Tekmetric, you can see exactly how your ad spend translates into real revenue, not just clicks.
"It's really hard to see what's working. One of the superpowers of this product is that it's connected directly with Tekmetric," said Jared Haleck, chief product officer, Tekmetric.
Tekmetric Digital Ads is in early access now and rolling out to selected customers.
Tekmetric Phones
Every missed moment at the front desk has a cost. Tekmetric Phones gives your service advisors the customer context they need — instantly, the moment the phone rings — so they can spend less time looking things up and more time taking care of customers.
"Service advisors especially are loving it,” Haleck said. “It just saves them so much time. It creates so much convenience for them.”
Tekmetric Phones is in beta, available for customers on RingCentral.
Watch the On-Demand Webinar
Langston and Haleck walked through all of it — the industry data, live product demos, and what's coming next — in their webinar, "Building for the Results-Driven Repair Shop."
See how your shop stacks up against thousands of auto repair shops nationwide
You track your ARO. Maybe you watch your car count week over week. You know when a month is good and when it's below par.
But here's a question most shop owners can't answer quickly: Compared to shops like yours, are your numbers strong, average, or quietly underperforming?
There's a real difference between a number that's improving and a number that's competitive. A shop can grow ARO year over year and still be well below what high-performing shops are seeing in their market. Without an external reference point, you don't know which situation you're in.
That's the problem benchmarking solves, and it's the reason the data matters more than the direction.
Internal Tracking Tells You the Trend. Benchmarking Tells You the Truth.
Internal performance tracking is essential. If you don't know your ARO, car count, parts margin, and effective labor rate, you're managing without the most basic tools. But internal tracking has a structural limitation: it can only tell you how you're doing relative to your own history.
That's useful for spotting momentum — a rising ARO, a growing car count, tighter parts margin. What it can't tell you is whether your baseline is strong or weak relative to the market.
A shop with a $580 ARO that has grown from $520 over two years has made real progress. But if top-performing shops in their region are averaging significantly higher, that progress hasn't closed the competitive gap. It's just moved in the right direction.
The fix isn't to stop internal tracking. It's to add an external benchmark so you know what the target actually looks like.
Many shop owners get their benchmarks the informal way: conversations with peers at trade shows, numbers shared in coaching groups, or revenue figures posted in forums. These have real value, but they're also limited.
Self-reported numbers skew high (people share their wins). Peer groups are small samples. Industry averages from trade associations are often lagged and lack the granularity you need to compare fairly — a six-bay shop in a suburban market shouldn't be benchmarking against national averages that include dealership-adjacent shops in metro areas.
The more useful comparison is data drawn from shops operating in similar conditions, at similar scale, tracked in a consistent and anonymized way.
What Good Benchmarking Actually Looks Like
Effective benchmarking for an auto repair shop compares you on the four metrics that most directly drive profitability:
ARO: Are you getting full value from each car that comes through your door?
Car count: Is your volume where it needs to be to support your revenue goals?
Parts margin: Are you protecting margin as supplier costs fluctuate?
Effective labor rate: Is your real revenue per labor hour aligned with your posted rate?
Each of these metrics has a different lever. If your ARO is lagging, the fix usually involves inspection completion rates or customer communication. If your car count is stagnant, the issue is typically acquisition or retention. If your parts margin is eroding, your pricing matrix needs a look. If your effective labor rate is low, it's often a discounting or packaging problem.
Benchmarking tells you which problem to solve first. That's valuable when you have limited time and you're trying to prioritize.
How the Tekmetric Shop Index Works
The Tekmetric Shop Index is a free benchmarking tool built from data collected across more than 12,000 auto repair shops. Enter your shop's metrics and get an instant comparison showing where you stand on each of the four key measures. No Tekmetric account is required. Anyone can use it.
The output isn't a vague grade — it shows you where each metric ranks and gives you a clear picture of where the gap is largest. That's the signal that tells you where to focus first.
The benchmarking data is the starting point, not the finish line. Once you know which metric is your biggest gap, you can start asking the right questions:
If ARO is lagging: How consistently are your technicians completing and sending digital vehicle inspections (DVIs)? Are customers seeing and approving the recommended work?
If car count is flat: Are you actively pursuing new customers? Are return visit intervals optimized? Are declined jobs being followed up?
If parts margin is soft: When did you last review your parts pricing matrix? Is it adjusting for recent cost increases from your vendors?
If the effective labor rate is low: Are service writers building jobs accurately? Are discounts being applied consistently or inconsistently?
Each of these questions points toward a workflow, and Tekmetric's reporting is built to surface the answers at the job, technician, and service writer level. But even before you get to that step, knowing which question to ask is most of the work.
High-performing shops don't treat benchmarking as a one-time exercise. They check their rankings periodically, track how their numbers shift against the industry baseline, and use the comparison to coach their teams with context.
"You're at 85% DVI completion" is a data point. "You're at 85% completion, and top shops are at 95%" is a coaching conversation with direction.
"Seeing them take the shift to Tekmetric and then grow profitability in the same four walls has been phenomenal. Some of them are just exponential." — Matt Schwab, Clutch Automotive, Tekmetric Customer
Takeaways
Internal tracking shows you direction; benchmarking shows you position.
The four metrics — ARO, car count, parts margin, effective labor rate — are the right comparison points.
Good benchmarking data is consistent, anonymized, and drawn from shops with similar operating profiles.
The TSI tool is free, built from more than 12,000 shops, and gives you an instant read on where your gaps are largest.
Your benchmark result tells you which lever to pull first — and that's where the work starts.
Once you know your gaps, the next step is building a system to close them.
Auto repair shops might bulk order carbon copies, or you might find a template online and print as many copies as your shop needs. Or, if your shop uses digital templates, you might have to deal with time-consuming digital file management.
Filling out the forms over and over, be it by handwriting or typing, can become tedious. And both options are less than ideal for record-keeping.
Paper can get lost, and digital files can become overwritten or corrupted. Both approaches are inconvenient and ultimately slow things down at your shop. And the impression you give during the payment process can determine whether those customers return or not.
Here are four reasons why a shop management system is better than an auto repair invoice template approach for your business.
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)