The cheapest workshop software is the system you’ve already got: paper job cards, a diary, a spreadsheet, Xero on its own. It costs $0 a month, and that number is the whole argument for keeping it. This post is about what it actually costs, with a worksheet you fill in with your own figures rather than ours.
What "good enough" costs in a year
$26,400
Unbilled labour
$11,520
Unbilled parts and sundries
$18,000
Admin time
$6,000
Customers who drift
Illustrative example only: a two-tech shop doing 30 jobs a week at $110 an hour. The worksheet below shows how each number is built so you can swap in your own.
The worksheet
Four lines. Each one is a formula you can do on the back of a job card. The example column uses 30 jobs a week, a $110 labour rate, 48 working weeks and 240 working days.
| Leak | Formula | Example inputs | Example per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unbilled labour | unbilled minutes per job ÷ 60 × jobs per week × rate × 48 | 10 min × 30 × $110 | $26,400 |
| Unbilled parts and sundries | unbilled $ per job × jobs per week × 48 | $8 × 30 | $11,520 |
| Admin time | hours a day on admin that software removes × what your hour is worth × 240 | 1.5 h × $50 | $18,000 |
| Customers who drift | customers a year a reminder would have kept × what they spend with you in a year | 10 × $600 | $6,000 |
| EXAMPLE TOTAL | $61,920 | ||
Your inputs will be different, and they should be. The point of the example is the shape: even if every line in your version comes out at a quarter of ours, the total is still many times what software costs. The rest of this post walks through where each line comes from and how to measure it.
Line 1 and 2: work that never reaches the invoice
This is the leak almost every workshop without a system has, and the one owners most often underestimate because it never shows up as a cost. The work gets done; the invoice just doesn’t say so.
Labour
- Road tests: 15 minutes after a brake job, rarely on the card
- Diagnosis: "I’ll just have a quick look" becomes an hour
- Overruns: booked 2 hours, took 3, charged 2
- Extras approved by phone: done, never written down
Parts and sundries
- Consumables: rags, brake clean, cable ties, grease
- Small parts: clips, bolts, washers
- Stock grabbed off the shelf and never put on the job
How to measure yours: take five finished job cards from last week and compare what was done with what was invoiced. Ten minutes of unbilled labour per job is a conservative figure for a paper workshop; some find a lot more. For sundries, a flat $8 a job is a common starting point.
How software closes it: the technician clocks on and off each job, so time is recorded while it happens rather than reconstructed at 5pm. Parts are reserved against the job and deducted when work starts. A sundries line applies to every invoice. The job card is the invoice, so anything added in the bay is already on it.
Line 3: admin time
Nobody opens a workshop to re-type the same customer details into three places. Paper and disconnected systems make you do exactly that: write the job card, type the invoice, key it into Xero, write the rego on the diary, ring the customer back because the quote went out by text and the approval came back by voicemail.
How to measure yours: for one week, log the minutes spent on these, every day:
- Writing up job cards and finding the customer’s history
- Turning finished jobs into invoices, and keying them into the accounts
- Chasing approvals and answering "is my car ready?" calls
- Service and WOF reminders (if they go out at all)
- End-of-day reconciliation
Put a value on the hour. $50 is modest if it’s the owner’s hour; use your own figure. The example assumes software removes an hour and a half a day, not all of it, because some admin always remains.
The admin that doesn’t get done
The worksheet counts the admin you do. It can’t count the admin you skip when the workshop is full: reminders that don’t go out, quotes that aren’t followed up, invoices sent a week late. That cost lands in lines 1 and 4 instead.
Line 4: customers who drift
Customers rarely leave a workshop in a huff. They forget a service is due, get caught with an expired WOF, go to whoever is closest, and quietly become someone else’s customer. Or you flagged the rear pads six months ago, nobody followed up, and the brake job went to the shop down the road.
This line gets more important from 1 November 2026, when many cars aged 4 to 14 years move to two-yearly WOFs. For those customers the legal reminder now fires half as often, so the workshop’s own reminders, keyed to service intervals and declined work, are what bring them back. We’ve covered that in how to keep customers when WOFs go two-yearly.
How to measure yours: count the customers you saw two years ago and haven’t seen since. Decide how many of those a timely text would have kept (the example says 10), and multiply by what a customer spends with you in a year (the example says two visits at $300).
The things that don’t fit on the worksheet
Some costs don’t reduce to a formula, so they’re listed rather than priced:
- You can’t see which jobs make money. Without a live margin on each job card, you find out which work loses money at year end, if at all.
- Online bookings and approvals aren’t an option. Customers who want to book or approve a quote at 9pm from the couch book with someone who lets them.
- No inspection report. "Your pads are at 2 mm" with a photo converts to a booking; "you’ll want to look at the brakes soon" said at the counter doesn’t.
- Records. When a customer says "you never told me about that brake issue", or an insurer wants the service history, paper either can’t be found or was never written. Cloud systems are backed up off-site and searchable; the filing cabinet isn’t.
Against the subscription
Hoist is $140 + GST a month, 3 users included, $10 a month per extra user. That is $1,680 + GST a year.
| Paper / old system | Hoist (first year) | |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription | $0 | $1,320 + GST |
| Example leakage (worksheet total) | $61,920 | A fraction of it, and visible |
Software doesn’t recover every dollar on the worksheet; some unbilled time and some admin will always exist. But it doesn’t need to. Recover a fifth of the example and the subscription is paid back roughly nine times over. Run your own version of the worksheet and the ratio will be similar, because the subscription is small and the leaks aren’t.
A 30-day plan
Four weeks, one decision
Week 1: fill in the worksheet
Log admin time for the week, compare five job cards with their invoices, count lapsed customers. Write the four numbers down.
Week 2: look at two or three options
Ask about the NZ specifics: GST invoices, Xero sync, WOF and service reminders by text, rego lookup, and what it costs per user.
Week 3: trial on real jobs
Hoist’s trial is 14 days, no card. Put a week of actual jobs through it. We can bring your customer and vehicle records across so you’re not starting from an empty screen.
Week 4: decide
Compare your worksheet total with the subscription. Pick the system, set a start date, and put every job through it from that day, with no paper running alongside.
"If it ain’t broke" is fair advice when you can see the thing working. The worksheet exists because with paper you can’t: the cost is spread across a few unbilled minutes on every job, and it never once appears on a bill.