An auto repair business benefits from using a business-specific and integrated accounting system into its daily business practices. This kind of integrated accounting software saves money, time, avoids duplicate data entry and ultimately serves as a panacea to the business owner to help prevent those nasty tax-based headaches that occur in the spring of every year.

Features and Benefits

A good auto repair business accounting system provides many options including appointment control, work-in-progress (WIP) tracking, point-of-sale accounting and customer data and history. The software also needs to provide parts management including inventory control, daily sales reports, time/materials invoice calculations, marketing features, payroll tied to invoicing, accounts receivable/payable, banking, general ledger integration and report capabilities that include uploading to other software systems such as QuickBooks.

Software Integration

An efficient accounting software system has access to future scheduling features, inventory, accounting alerts, customer retention tools and marketing capabilities. Each of the modules in an accounting system must be integrated with the system’s other modules to prevent duplicate data and allow data sharing between modules.

Payroll, Job Costing and Customer Invoicing

When an employee reports the hours worked on a particular vehicle, in an integrated software system, this information feeds payroll, job costing, inventory and parts management (if needed), customer invoicing and history.

Database Access

Industry standards set the times needed to complete specific car repair jobs and a good accounting system provides national job guide data at the touch of a button. Additionally, good accounting systems also have vendor integration capabilities so that part ordering can occur through the accounting software system and the transaction automatically books into the appropriate modules.

Banking, Check Writing and Credit Card Features

Banking, check writing and credit card charges are all part of the daily aspects of managing the cash flow for an auto repair business. Software that integrates these features makes it easy to run your business without spending a lot of time handling accounting functions, as the integration allows these transactions to book across the needed modules.