Repairs and invoices

The Invoice That Couldn't Be Reconstructed

The job was a transmission rebuild on a 2019 F-150. Parts were ordered across three visits. Two mechanics split the hours. There was a discount because the customer had referred two friends the month prior. By the time the invoice was ready, the shop owner was working from memory and a text thread on his phone. The subtotal was right. The discount calculation was wrong. The tax was applied to items that shouldn't have been taxable. The customer paid without questioning it, which meant the shop ate the difference, and nobody caught it until month-end reconciliation showed the margin on the job was 40 percent below where it should have been.

That is a flat-rate shop running on gut feel instead of a system. The Repairs and Invoices template is the system.

Four Linked Libraries, One Operational Picture

The template runs as a multi-library database: the main invoice library, plus separate linked libraries for Employees, Repairs, Items, and Customers. This is not redundancy — it's the structural separation that makes the data reusable.

The Customers library holds the full vehicle profile alongside the customer contact record. Customer ID, name, phone, email, address, driver's license number and state issued, license plate, and then the vehicle data: year, make (from a list of 14 manufacturers), model, VIN scannable by barcode, mileage in miles, and a Key Password field for vehicles with security codes or keyless systems. The VIN field is a barcode scan, not a text entry — you scan the VIN label under the windshield or from the door jamb and it populates. Eliminating the 17-character manual transcription eliminates the transcription errors that cause parts lookup failures.

The Repairs library is where each job lives. Repair ID, linked customer (which pulls Year and Make into the job view automatically), Job Name, VIN (linked separately from the customer's VIN for cross-verification), Invoice Number, Date, and Job Status: Not Started, In Progress, Revision, Completed, or Lost. The Job Status field is how the dispatch board works. Filter on In Progress and you see every open job. Filter on Revision and you see every job that went back for additional work. Filter on Lost and you start asking why.

Job Owner links to the Employee record, which pulls that employee's hourly rate into the job automatically. Hours worked multiplied by the pulled hourly rate produces Total Job Cost without any manual calculation. The Paid radio button and the Signature field close the job record once the customer has settled and signed off.

The Items Library and Taxable Flag

The Items library is the parts and service catalog. Item ID, Name, Description, and Category — a 19-category classification that covers Body, Brakes, Climate Control, Cooling, Drive Belts, Drivetrain, Electrical, Emission Control, Engine, Exhaust, Fluids, Hardware, Ignition, Interior, Sensors, Starting & Charging, and Suspension & Steering. The Taxable boolean is the operational piece. Parts are generally taxable. Labor is generally not, depending on jurisdiction. When you tag each item in the catalog as taxable or non-taxable, the invoice library can correctly apply tax only to the flagged line items without requiring the invoicer to remember which category falls under which tax treatment.

The main invoice library connects a Repair job and an Item from the catalog, takes a Quantity and a Price, and calculates the line-item Total as Qty × Price. Multiple invoice lines roll up against a single repair job. The hide fields boolean at the top of each invoice record collapses the display to show only the relevant fields for the current invoice state — a practical UI choice for a phone screen on the shop floor.

What the Discount and Signature Fields Actually Protect

The Discount field in the Repairs library is an integer — a percentage point discount applied at the job level. It lives in the repair record, not in the invoice line items, which means it applies to the entire job total rather than to individual parts. This matters because a customer relationship discount or a goodwill adjustment is a job-level decision, not a part-level calculation.

The Signature field at the close of each repair record is the legal anchor. When a customer signs off on completed work, that signature is attached to the job record alongside the invoice total, the date, and the job description. In a he-said-she-said dispute about what was authorised or what was charged, a signed repair order with a timestamped job description is the evidence that ends the conversation.

At 200 repair jobs in the database, the Employee records show who owns which jobs and at what hourly rate — data that feeds directly into payroll calculation for hourly mechanics without a separate timesheet system.