It’s 10:30am. There’s a Hilux on the hoist that needs front pads and rotors. You ring the parts supplier, wait on hold, read out the rego, spell your workshop name again, write down the prices, confirm availability, give your account number, hang up. Twelve minutes, give or take. Do that eight times a day and parts ordering has eaten an hour and a half before you’ve fixed anything.
Supplier integration is the idea that your workshop software should do that for you: search the supplier’s catalogue from the job card, see price and availability, place the order, and have the part land on the job with its cost already recorded. This post explains how it works, what NZ suppliers offer, what it saves, and exactly where Hoist is at with it.
Where Hoist is at
Supplier catalogue integration (searching and ordering from a supplier inside Hoist) is on our roadmap. It is not live today. What is live: parts and stock on every job card, reserve-on-job and deduct-on-start, purchase orders you raise yourself or have drafted from low stock, multiple suppliers per part, supplier bills, a stocktake count sheet, and a price matrix that applies your markup automatically. Details below, so you can judge the gap for yourself.
How Supplier Integration Works
Integration connects your workshop software to a supplier’s catalogue and ordering system through an API, so the two systems talk to each other instead of you translating between them. When it’s done well, ordering looks like this:
The vehicle is already known
Make, model, year and engine come from the job card. Nothing to re-key, nothing to read out over the phone.
The catalogue filters to that vehicle
You see parts that fit, with trade price and stock status, ideally from more than one supplier side by side.
You order from the job card
The order goes to the supplier on your existing trade account. No phone call, no email, no transcription.
The part lands on the job with its cost
Cost price, part number and supplier are recorded against the job, your markup is applied, and the invoice is right without anyone hunting for a docket.
What NZ Suppliers Offer
Several of the national trade suppliers (Repco, BNT, NAPA, Partmaster and others) run some kind of online trade ordering, from a web portal you log into through to an API that workshop software can connect to. Which one you get, and whether it connects to your particular software, varies by supplier and changes over time, so we’re not going to publish a table that will be wrong in six months. Ask your rep two questions:
- "Do you have a trade ordering portal I can use today?" Even without software integration, ordering through a portal instead of the phone removes the hold time and the transcription errors.
- "Which workshop software do you integrate with, and what’s the process to connect?" You’ll usually need your trade account credentials and, for API integrations, something set up at the supplier’s end.
Your local independent supplier is more likely to be phone and email only. That’s fine: they earn their place on advice, fitment knowledge and turning up with the part in twenty minutes.
What It Saves
It depends on how many orders you place and how you place them now. Here’s the maths with illustrative numbers; put your own in.
Phone ordering (say)
- Look up vehicle details: 2 min
- Ring supplier, wait on hold: 3 min
- Describe the parts needed: 2 min
- Confirm price and availability: 2 min
- Place the order: 2 min
- Write it on the job card: 1 min
About 12 minutes per order
Integrated ordering (say)
- Open parts search from the job card: 15 sec
- Find the part: 30 sec
- Compare suppliers: 30 sec
- Order: 15 sec
- Lands on the job automatically
About 90 seconds per order
Ten minutes saved per order, eight orders a day, 250 working days: roughly 333 hours a year. Not all of that becomes billable time, but if even a third of it did at $100 an hour, that’s about $11,000 a year, before you count fewer wrong-part returns and the odd cheaper supplier you’d never have rung. A portal alone, without software integration, gets you a good chunk of the same saving.
How Parts Ordering Works in Hoist Today
No catalogue search yet, but the rest of the chain is built so that when the order is placed, everything after it is automatic:
- Parts on the job card. Add stocked parts from your inventory or a one-off part for this job. Stock is reserved when it goes on the job and deducted when the job starts.
- Purchase orders. Raise a PO yourself, or let Hoist draft one from your low-stock list. Each part can have more than one supplier, so the PO goes to whoever you pick for that part.
- Receiving and supplier bills. Receive the PO and record the supplier bill against it.
- Price matrix. Your markup tiers apply automatically, and the job card shows live margin as parts and labour go on.
- Stocktake. A count sheet for the periodic stocktake, so dead stock shows up before it becomes a write-off.
In practice that means: order through the supplier’s portal or by phone, then add the part to the job in Hoist from the PO. When supplier catalogue integration ships, the first step collapses into the second. If that feature is the deciding factor for you right now, we’d rather you knew that before the trial than after.
What to Look For in an Integration
When you’re comparing software (ours or anyone’s), the integrations that save time share a few things:
| Feature | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Vehicle-specific filtering | Only shows parts that fit the vehicle on the job, which is where most wrong-part orders come from |
| Multi-supplier search | Price and availability side by side, so you’re not defaulting to whoever you always ring |
| Live availability | Know it’s in stock before you promise the customer a time |
| Automatic job linking | Cost, part number and supplier land on the job with no manual entry |
| Order history | Re-order what you used last time on that model in a couple of taps |
What to Do This Week
- List your main suppliers and ask each one the two questions above.
- Switch routine orders to whatever portal they offer. Keep the phone for fitment advice and urgent runs.
- Set your markup matrix in your software now, so parts are priced consistently whether they arrive by API or by phone.
- If you’re weighing up Hoist, run the free trial with your real suppliers set up against real parts, and tell us what you’d want the catalogue integration to do.