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Repair-order writing

Write the RO inside Pitlane. No second tab.

Pitlane writes the repair order. That used to be the reason every shop still paid for a second tool. Now the RO lives in the same place as the customer record, the inspection, the SMS thread, and the payment. Lines are typed once. They flow into the estimate, the invoice, and the payment without retyping anywhere.

Lines built around the way the bay actually works.

Every line on a Pitlane RO carries the things the shop floor needs: line type (labor, part, sublet, fluid, tire, fee), description, quantity, unit price, and the tech assigned to that specific line. A 4-line brake job split between two techs reports correctly. Hours land on the right tech's timecard. Margin lives on the line where the part is, not buried in a separate parts module.

Type a line, drag it where you want it on the ticket, blur the price field, watch the totals recalc. No save button. No "now generate the invoice."

Type the concern, get suggested jobs.

The advisor pastes "rear brakes squealing at low speed" into the concern box. Pitlane suggests three lines — rear brake pads, rotor inspection, brake cleaner — each with a sane labor estimate and a price you can edit. The advisor accepts the ones that fit, edits the rest, and the RO is half-written in 15 seconds.

The suggestions are grounded in the vehicle's actual history. If the same Civic had its front brakes done four months ago, the suggestion includes that context. Prompts run through Anthropic's Claude with zero-retention — nothing is stored, nothing is trained on.

Clock in. Clock out. The hours stick to the line.

Tap a line, clock in. Time runs against that specific line. Tap again to clock out (or move to another line, which auto-stops the prior one). The duration sums per tech, per line, per day, per week. No paper timecards. No "what did Mike work on yesterday?" reconstructions on Friday afternoon.

Multiple clock-in / clock-out cycles per line are fine. The line carries them all. The labor total uses the priced labor; the time entries are for tech productivity and payroll reporting.

Margin per line, never shown to the customer.

Pitlane tracks unit cost per line internally. The customer-facing estimate and invoice show only what they should — the price they're paying. The shop owner's view shows the margin column: a quick scan of a finished RO tells you which lines earned and which lines were sold thin. No spreadsheet. No after-hours reconciliation.

Cost is in cents to avoid float drift on margin math. The whole thing is one page.

How it works.

01

Open the RO

From the dispatch board, from the customer record, from an existing inspection — all paths land on the same RO page. No mode switching.

02

Type the concern or pick from prior work

Concern in plain English. Pitlane suggests lines. Or pull from the vehicle's prior RO with one tap and edit from there.

03

Assign techs, clock time, mark margin

Per-line tech assignment. Clock-in/out on each line. Cost and margin live in your view only. The customer sees a clean estimate.

This runs for your shop on a 30-day free trial.

Every feature on this page is included in the trial. No credit card. Live in under 10 minutes.

Questions about repair-order writing.

Is this a full shop management system now?

It writes the RO end-to-end with per-line tech, time, cost, margin, and customer authorization. Parts ordering (PartsTech) and OEM labor times (MOTOR) are still on the roadmap — once they land, the RO writer is feature-complete for a typical independent shop.

Can the AI write lines for symptoms I haven't seen before?

Yes. The suggestion model reads the concern text, the vehicle (year, make, model, mileage, prior RO history), and your shop's labor matrix. It returns three drafted lines you can accept, edit, or ignore. It's a head start, not the final say — every line stays editable.

What if a tech splits an RO across multiple sessions?

Time entries per line are unbounded. A tech can clock in, clock out, walk away, come back, clock in again. Pitlane sums durations per line and per tech. The labor line price stays what you priced it at; the time entries feed productivity reports and payroll.

More features.