Workshop Management Software for UK Garages
See every job, every bay, every technician – at a glance.
Running a workshop from memory and whiteboards works until it doesn’t. One double-booked bay, one forgotten job, one technician standing around waiting for parts that haven’t arrived – and your whole day unravels. Torqueflow gives you a live view of your entire workshop so you always know what’s happening and what’s coming next.
What it does
Torqueflow’s workshop management is built around two views: a kanban board showing every job’s status, and a scheduler showing your bays and time slots. Around them sit the parts catalog, supplier records, time-tracking kiosk, holiday booking, customer data quality tools, and the multi-location dashboard if you run more than one site.
Every part of the workshop talks to every other part. Move a job, and the customer text fires. Tag a tyre, and the disposal levy lands on the invoice. Clock in at the kiosk, and the timesheet builds itself.
Why this matters
Monday morning and the whiteboard already disagrees with the diary.
You know the drill. Steve walks in Monday morning and the whiteboard says one thing, the diary says another, and Dave’s already started on a job that was supposed to wait for parts. Chloe’s fielding calls about cars she can’t see in the system. Half the day’s gone before anyone’s actually productive.
The problem isn’t your team – it’s that everyone’s working from different information. The whiteboard’s out of date the moment someone forgets to update it. The paper diary doesn’t tell you if a bay is actually free or just looks free.
Torqueflow puts everyone on the same page. One source of truth, updated in real time, visible to everyone who needs it.
Jobs and the workshop floor
Kanban board
Every job is a card. Every stage is a column.
Every job in your workshop appears as a card on the kanban board. Cards move through columns as work progresses – from booked, to checked in, to in progress, to awaiting parts, to quality check, to ready for collection.
At a glance
Know where your bottlenecks are before they cost you the afternoon.
Click into any card for the full picture – vehicle details, work items, technician assignment, parts status, customer notes, photos.
Configurable workflow statuses
Your workshop doesn’t work like every other workshop.
Maybe you have a “sublet out” stage for specialist work. Maybe you split “in progress” into “diagnostics” and “repair.” Maybe you need a “customer contacted” step before collection.
Torqueflow lets you define your own workflow statuses. Add, rename, reorder, and colour-code the columns to match how your garage actually operates.
Bay scheduler with drag-and-drop
Every bay is a lane. Every job is a block.
The scheduler shows your workshop as a calendar with bays as columns. Each bay is a vertical lane, and jobs slot into time blocks throughout the day.
Switch between day, week, and multi-week views. Drag-and-drop a job to a different bay or time slot.
Drag-and-drop scheduling
Move a job to a different bay? Drag and drop.
Rescheduling from Tuesday to Wednesday is a drag-and-drop. Swapping two jobs between bays is two drag-and-drops. No re-entering data. No crossing things out and rewriting them.
When you move a job, all the linked information follows – technician assignment, parts allocation, customer notifications. Everything stays connected.
For the customer-facing side of this (online booking, automated reminders, no-show prevention), see online booking for garages and our guide to garage booking systems.
Vehicle presence tracking
Know exactly which cars are on your premises right now.
Torqueflow tracks whether a vehicle is physically on-site. When a customer drops off, you mark the vehicle as present. When it’s collected, you mark it gone. The Voice AI uses this to answer “Is my car still with you?” without bothering anyone.
You also see at a glance which cars have been sitting in your car park uncollected for three days – the kind of thing you usually only notice when the customer rings asking for it.
Technician job cards
Each technician has their own job card view – what they’re working on today, what’s next, what they need. From the job card, Dave can:
When you move a job, all the linked information follows – technician assignment, parts allocation, customer notifications. Everything stays connected.
Photos are particularly valuable. When Dave finds a corroded brake line, he photographs it from the job card. That photo is instantly available to Chloe for the customer quote, to the Voice AI if the customer calls, and to the customer portal if they’re checking online.
Checklist templates
Create reusable inspection checklists for common jobs – MOT prep checks, interim services, full services, pre-purchase inspections, seasonal checks. Each checklist is a structured list of items to inspect, with pass/fail/advisory options and space for notes and photos. Run through it once, the results feed directly into the work order and the customer-facing report.
AI diagnostic assistant
Describe the symptoms, add a photo, and the AI assistant helps your technician structure the diagnosis, right on the job card. It already knows the car’s MOT status and your service history with it, so “what have we done on this car before?” gets an answer grounded in your own records, not a generic guess. Snap the part, the damage, or the reading on the scan-tool screen and it reads the photo alongside the question.
The assistant is a second pair of eyes, not a verdict. Your technician makes the call.
You fitted a new cyl 3 coil here in Aug 2024. If it has failed again this soon, check the loom before fitting another coil. Suggested order:
Manufacturer repair times and service schedules
Manufacturer-grade repair times and service schedules, pre-filled into quotes and invoices. Torqueflow has Haynes Pro vehicle data built in: identify the vehicle once against its exact manufacturer type, then pull the standard repair time for a job straight onto the quote as a labour line, costed at your hourly rate. No more guessing hours or thumbing a times guide.
Service quoting works the same way. Pull the manufacturer’s due-service schedule for that exact vehicle, down to lubricant quantities and timed follow-up jobs, and the related part categories come with it, matched against your own parts catalogue where you stock them. A complete, accurate service quote in a couple of minutes, priced at your rates.
Parts & suppliers
Parts catalog
The parts catalog is your central record of every part you fit – your part number, the supplier’s part number, descriptions, supplier links, default markup, default nominal code. Add a part once and it’s available everywhere: invoice line editor, work-order builder, AI scan matching.
When the AI scans a supplier invoice, it matches lines against your catalog automatically. The first time you fit a new part, add it to the catalog inline from the scan review screen – no detour through Settings.
Supplier management
Track every supplier in one place: contact details, default payment terms, default nominal code, payment methods, delivery patterns. Each purchase invoice links to the right supplier so you can see at a glance what you’re spending where.
Suppliers also flow through to Xero as Contacts (if Xero is connected) so the same supplier exists once in both systems.
Costs flow everywhere
When you log a purchase invoice, parts on that invoice update their cost record automatically. Updated costs flow through to the technician commission report and the financial reports – so you can see exactly which job types are profitable and which are eating margin.
Stock and inventory
Today’s cost. Today’s margin. Not eighteen months ago.
Every part in the catalog tracks its cost from the supplier and the price you charge. When you log a purchase invoice, the parts on that invoice update their cost record automatically – so when you next quote that part, you’re working from current cost, not the price your supplier charged you eighteen months ago.
If you’re evaluating this against dedicated purchase order software, know how Torqueflow handles it today: there’s no separate PO-raising step. The parts catalogue and supplier records tie every purchase invoice back to cost and stock automatically instead, so you see what’s owed to each supplier without a spreadsheet.
Costs flow through to the technician commission report and the financial reports, so you can see exactly which job types are profitable and which are eating margin.
Tracked against the part itself – not buried in a single invoice.
Log a purchase invoice and the cost on every line refreshes the catalog record.
Profitability per job type, not just blanket markup.
MOT-ready
MOTs are the heartbeat of an independent garage. We treat them like it.
Type the registration; the rest fills itself in. MOT history, due dates, advisories and fail reasons live on every vehicle record – and reminders go out automatically at the interval you set.
- VRM lookup pulls vehicle make, model, colour, MOT status, and tax status straight from DVLA. Type the registration; the rest fills itself in.
- MOT history is on every vehicle record — last test date, advisories, fail reasons.
- MOT reminders fire automatically at the right interval (you set the timing). The reminder goes out by SMS or email and offers an online booking slot in the same message.
- Voice AI answers “I need to book my MOT” calls 24/7 without bothering anyone in the workshop. It checks your scheduler and offers the caller real dates.
- Zero-rated VAT on MOT labour is built into the labour code so you never have to manually adjust VAT on the invoice.
Time, attendance, and pay
Clock in once. Pay reports build themselves.
Time-tracking kiosk
Staff clock in and out at a tablet on the wall – or from their own job card if you’d rather. The kiosk uses a PIN for each staff member and supports optional photo verification at clock-in and clock-out for organisations that need an audit trail.
Once clocked in, technicians log time against specific work orders directly from their job card. Every minute is attached to a job, every job carries its labour cost, every invoice generates with the correct labour line.
Per-staff break and pay configuration
Most garages have mixed contracts – some salaried, some hourly, apprentices on different rates from senior techs. Torqueflow lets you set:
- A per-staff break override – whether breaks are paid or unpaid, overriding the org-wide default.
- An hourly pay rate per staff member, used to estimate pay in the time-tracking report.
The time-tracking report shows hours × rate per entry and a total estimated-pay summary, exportable to CSV for payroll. Staff without a configured rate show as “—” rather than £0.00 – distinct from explicit zero.
Holiday entitlement & absence
Allowance per staff. Calendar of who’s off when.
Track holiday allowance per staff member, log holidays and absences against a calendar, see who’s off when. Holiday hours flow into the time-tracking report so payroll calculations stay accurate.
Technician commission
Per-tech labour attribution. Payroll-ready CSV.
If you pay technicians on commission, the Technician Commission report gives you a per-tech breakdown of attributed labour revenue, the tech’s commission rate, and what they’re owed for the period. Each invoice labour line carries the technician who did the work, even when multiple techs were on the same job (commission gets split evenly for fixed-price labour).
Fixed-cost labour pricing
Not every job is hourly. Configure labour codes as either hourly (rate × hours) or fixed price (e.g. “Van Service – £129”). Fixed-cost codes invoice as qty 1 at the configured price, regardless of time logged. Mix and match per job.
Customer records & data quality
Customer merge tool
Customer records get duplicated. Walk-in vs phone-call entries, Techman imports vs hand-typed records, “Mr Smith” vs “M. Smith”. The merge tool lets an Owner or Manager combine two records into one with a side-by-side cherry-pick of every field. Work orders, invoices, vehicles, messages, payments – all reparent to the survivor.
Duplicate suggestions
A nightly scan flags pairs that look like the same person or business and queues them up at Customers → Duplicate suggestions. Confidence levels (High / Medium / Low) reflect how strong the match is – same phone, same email, similar company name. Review, merge, or dismiss in seconds. Bulk-merge high-confidence pairs in a single click.
Customer deletion (with safeguards)
Sometimes the right answer is delete, not merge – a fake record, a typo, a test entry. The Delete flow checks for active work orders, unpaid invoices, and active conversations first, blocks the delete if any are present, and runs a 30-second undo if you change your mind. Historical paid invoices stay on file regardless, so HMRC retention is respected.
Sometimes the right answer is delete, not merge. The Delete flow checks for active work orders, unpaid invoices, and active conversations first, blocks the delete if any are present, and runs a 30-second undo if you change your mind. Historical paid invoices stay on file regardless – HMRC retention is respected.
Multi-location
Run more than one site? Torqueflow handles it natively.
Each location has its own bays, its own scheduler, its own technicians, its own kiosk. Owners get a unified dashboard rolling everything up. Per-location reports, per-location billing, per-location branding (subdomains, phone numbers, logos).
Adding bays at any location auto-syncs to your subscription quantity (Stripe-handled) so you don’t get double-billed or under-billed when you grow or shrink.
Adding bays at any location auto-syncs to your subscription quantity, so you don’t get double-billed or under-billed when you grow or shrink.
Subdomains, phone numbers, logos. Customer at one branch doesn’t get treated as a stranger at another – records are shared.
The 20-bay-per-location cap is a UI choice (keeps the scheduler readable). Multi-location garages can have far more bays in total across sites.
The real difference
One action, multiple outcomes. That’s the point.
Workshop management tools aren’t new. What’s different here is that Torqueflow’s workshop connects to everything else.
The kanban board isn’t just a task tracker – it feeds your Voice AI, your customer portal, your invoicing, and your reports. When Dave moves a job to “complete”, the customer gets a text, the invoice starts generating, and the next caller asking “Is it ready?” gets a straight answer.
Dave moves card to Complete
SMS fires to customer
Invoice starts generating
Voice AI says “yes, ready”
FAQS
The rest of what owners ask us.
Quick summary
The one-page version.
|
What |
How |
|
Workshop overview |
Kanban board with live job status |
|
Workflow stages |
Fully configurable to match your process |
|
Bay scheduling |
Calendar view, drag-and-drop, day/week/multi-week |
|
Vehicle tracking |
On-site presence logged for every vehicle |
|
Technician view |
Individual job cards with photo capture and time logging |
|
Inspection checklists |
Reusable templates for common job types |
|
AI diagnostic assistant |
Symptoms and photos in, structured diagnosis out, on the job card |
|
Parts catalog |
Central part records, AI-match-ready |
|
Supplier management |
One supplier record, syncs to Xero |
|
Time tracking + kiosk |
PIN-based clock in/out, optional photo verification |
|
Per-staff pay config |
Break override + hourly rate, used in payroll exports |
|
Holiday entitlement |
Allowance tracking, absence calendar |
|
Commission reporting |
Per-tech labour attribution, payroll-ready CSV |
|
Fixed-cost labour |
Hourly OR flat-price labour codes |
|
Customer dedup |
Manual merge + automatic duplicate suggestions |
|
Customer deletion |
Safeguarded delete with 30-second undo |
|
Multi-location |
One account, per-site bays / scheduling / branding |
One source of truth.
Visible to everyone who needs it.
Start free. See the board light up with your own jobs, your own bays, your own team.