One Desktop Server in your back office holds all of it – cases, photos, invoices, payrolls – on your own hardware, and it keeps working when the internet does not. That one server feeds every PC and every phone in the shop: Workflow and the mobile clients install on as many machines as you need.

1. Every car in the shop on one board

Workflow shows the shop as buckets, and every case sits in the bucket that matches its stage: Opportunities, Drop-off, Tear Down, Assembly, Paint, Completed, Picked Up. Bucket names, their order and the actions they fire are yours to edit, because no two shops route a car the same way.

Open a case and the vehicle, the customer, the estimate lines, the photos grouped by category, every invoice, every message, every call and every completed checklist are in one place. An estimator, a bodytech and a painter each pull what they need without asking anyone. When a bodytech uploads a supplement photo, the estimator is notified and an icon appears on the case, so you are not giving the same instruction twice a day.

2. Damage photos taken the way the insurer wants them

No camera, no card reader, no naming files into folders. Open the mobile app, pick the photo template for that insurance company, and the app walks you shot by shot through what is required. Photos land on your Desktop Server and sort themselves into Preliminary, Estimate Lines, Supplements and Complete, each carrying the description the insurer expects.

Submitting to the insurer is one click. File size, format and per-photo descriptions are already handled. Anyone documenting a car can hold to record a voice note on a photo, optionally converted to text, instead of typing on a phone next to a paint booth.

3. The case fills itself in

Point the phone at the VIN plate and make, model, year and VIN populate. Scan the barcode on the customer's driver's license and the customer record fills in. Assignments and estimates import from CCC ONE®, Mitchell® and Audatex® every few minutes, so the lines – description, operation, labor type, estimated time, part number, price – are already sitting in the case before anyone opens it.

From there you assign a bodytech to a single line or to a whole labor group, and export a per-employee work plan to Excel.

4. Parts and invoices that stay attached to the car

Scan a vendor invoice with the phone and it goes to the right case, cropped and recognized. Workflow posts most of the fields without anyone typing them. On iOS you can batch a stack of invoices in one pass.

The parts list is color-coded – grey not ordered, light green ordered, green received – so one glance tells you what is holding the car. Parts change hands by scanning a QR code, with the whole transfer history kept. You order parts and schedule sublet labor without leaving Workflow, and when a part flagged Notify is received the customer is told automatically. Invoices and payments push into QuickBooks®, which needs to be running on the same PC.

5. Payroll builds itself as cars move

EstVis records when each employee arrives at the workplace and leaves it, then works from that alongside the labor hours on the estimate and the actual time the repair stage took. Payrolls generate as cases move between buckets and are color-coded blue paid, green unpaid, red overpaid. Export them to a file or print them.

The formulas are yours: your hourly rates, your bonus rules, your weekly goal thresholds. If you run an employee insurance fund, EstVis withholds a percentage of each payment into a per-employee pool up to a cap you set, pauses when the cap is reached and resumes after write-offs.

6. The customer stops calling to ask

The assignment lands and the customer is asked for damage photos and a signed Work Authorization. A part arrives and the customer is told. The case moves to a bucket you tagged and the customer gets a status update. The first Complete photo is taken on mobile and the customer gets "ready for pick-up" with the deductible, the betterment and a payment link. Seven days later a satisfaction request goes out, and Google and Yelp links are included only if the rating clears the threshold you set. SMS, email or both, from the EstVis domain or from your own SMTP server.

When customers do call, the Asterisk integration puts their name, vehicle, claim and current repair status on screen before anyone picks up. Whoever is nearest can answer: "Good morning, John! I'm glad to inform you that your car is being painted right now. How can I help you?" Calls, texts and emails all end up in that car's folder, and a dormant-customer report tells you which scheduled customers never answered anything.

7. Five places money leaves without a decision

Paint materials. EstVis reads consumption from PPG®, Axalta® and BASF® against what the estimate allowed. When actual exceeds estimated, the case flags red and EstVis supplements with the mixing-system invoice attached.
Parts price difference. The estimating system's list price and the vendor's invoice disagree, sometimes by hundreds of dollars. EstVis warns you on the case and can push the correction back to the estimating system after review.
Mechanical labor billed at the body rate. An alternator, an A/C compressor, a control arm left on the Body rate ships to the insurer $30 to $60 an hour below the Mechanical rate. EstVis audits every line of every estimate against a deterministic rule and flags the mismatches with the hours at stake. Your team files the supplement in CCC ONE – EstVis surfaces what needs changing, it does not edit the estimate.
Additional services. A menu of paid add-ons goes out on its own at a stage you pick: car wash, wheel alignment, headlight restoration. The customer selects, signs a generated PDF and pays. Order of magnitude: about $800 per $100,000 of repair sales.
Cheaper aftermarket parts. Every imported estimate is checked. If a cheaper equivalent exists, an icon appears on the case and on the line, and you order it from there.

The Workflow Metrics tab reports on them: paint materials estimated against actual, the labor hours fixed on the corrections report, the additional services ordered and the income they brought in, alongside the rest of your shop KPIs.

How EstVis increases profitability goes through each of these line by line.

Two smaller ones. Asterisk replaces your phone service: the recommended stack runs about $10 a month for five lines, with hardware a one-time cost under $300, and EstVis specialists install it end to end. A manager can also watch each workplace live from Workflow.

8. The car arrives with the paperwork already done

The insurance company creates the assignment. EstVis imports it within minutes as a case and texts the customer a link: take damage photos, review and sign the Work Authorization. The WA PDF is already filled with the vehicle, the customer, the claim number and the address. The customer signs on their phone and the signed copy files itself into the case folder.

Your estimator pre-estimates off those photos and pre-orders parts before the car is in your lot. When the parts land, the customer is notified and picks a drop-off time. Then they hand over keys. Nothing to print, nothing to sign at the counter, and the car starts moving the day it arrives instead of waiting on an order.

None of this asks an estimator to write estimates differently or a bodytech to learn a new trade. Desktop Server installs in about five minutes, adding your employees takes another ten, and shops report their staff are comfortable in two or three days. The first month is free with every feature included and no credit card, and pricing is on the site rather than behind a form.