A truck repair shop's whole job, from inspection to invoice, in one system

Intake

The service writer finds the vehicle by plate or VIN, records the odometer and the customer's concern in their own words, and books an appointment.

Digital vehicle inspection

Technicians grade each checklist item by severity and record conditions, measurements, and photos; out-of-spec values flag themselves. One click emails the customer a branded report with a portal link to the photos.

Estimate from findings

A wizard prices each finding through the shop's canned service jobs. Must-do items become firm lines; the rest become optional services.

Customer approval

On the portal, the customer adds the jobs they want, watches the total update, signs, and pays a deposit if the shop asks for one. Approved jobs land on the repair order as parts and labor, flagged so nothing bills twice, and the order records what was approved and declined.

Parts

Confirming a repair reserves stocked parts and raises purchase orders for the rest. Vendor documents that arrive by email are imported automatically, and an AI matcher suggests which repair order an incoming purchase order belongs to, for one-click confirmation.

Scheduling

Openings are drawn from every qualified technician's shift, time off, and calendar at once. Taking a slot assigns whoever is free. Move the appointment, the job, or the date, and the other two follow.

Technician time and the iPad app

Technicians run a timer on the job, feeding estimated-versus-actual reporting while the customer pays the flat rate they approved. An iPad-first app shows each technician their jobs, the timer, parts with camera barcode scanning, and inspections.

Vehicles

A catalog of 2,387 models across 87 makes, including Class 6–8 trucks, plus a Decode VIN button backed by NHTSA's public VIN service.

Accounting

A US GAAP chart of accounts, automated FIFO inventory valuation, and a rehearsed QuickBooks cutover plan for accounts, customers, vendors, active products, and open receivables and payables, gated on a trial-balance match.

Platform

Odoo 18 Community (OCB) with roughly 180 core and OCA modules listed in one file and pinned as git submodules, including OCA repair, fleet, resource_booking, queue_job, l10n_us_gaap, MIS Builder, EDI, and the shopfloor app framework.

Declarative environment

odoo-nix builds the Python environment, runs PostgreSQL and Odoo in development, and applies module migrations at deploy time.

Small, tested custom modules, one concern each (vehicles, inspections, estimates, scheduling, VIN decode, the technician app), with tests run by Odoo's own test runner.

Notable engineering

Dragging an appointment changes the calendar event, not the booking, so a targeted override keeps the repair order in sync. OCA's capacity checks run at every level, so double-booking is impossible rather than discouraged.

Demo shop

A demo module seeds a full shop with 18 repair orders across every stage, so we can show the whole flow on a fresh database.

Shared building blocks from our public Odoo addons: email and SMS through Cloudflare and Twilio, document import from email, and the Carbon theme and shopfloor tooling.