Every screen exists because someone in the shop needs it at a particular moment. Here is the order they get used in.
Customer, vehicle, VIN and what the customer says is wrong. The work order records who wrote it up.
Sixteen stages from intake to pickup, including waiting on a customer, waiting on parts and finding something else. Every move records who made it, so the board answers where a car is without anybody opening it.
Signing in with a personal PIN claims the job. Diagnosis, labor lines and parts land against their name, at the labor rate the VIN already chose for that class of vehicle.
A courtesy multi-point, a billed diagnosis or a deep diagnostic — different jobs, different sheets. A truck is asked about its air system and DEF; a car never is. A half-finished sheet cannot be passed off as a clean bill of health.
Labor and parts at your rates, with the inspection findings and photos beside them. The customer unticks anything they do not want and signs. You can text them the link from your own shop number and carry on the conversation there.
Everything freezes, fingerprinted with SHA-256 and signed, naming the technician and whoever sealed it. Nothing about it can be edited afterwards, by your staff or by us — a mistake is corrected with a note recorded beside it, never by changing what was written. Repairs involving parts mint a warranty token against that record.
Each seal is also linked to the one before it, so a repair or a payment cannot later be removed from your books without the gap showing. Publish that chain's fingerprint and the date stops being yours to move.
The moment the technician says the work is finished — paid or not, because the repair either happened or it did not — it is published to CarKnown, the vehicle's permanent record. What travels is the work, the parts and your shop's name. What never travels is your pricing, your cost, your vendors or anything about the customer.
So when that car is sold, or turns up at another garage in four years, what you did is on its record with your name against it. Any customer can decline, and the shop decides once whether it publishes at all.
The invoice is generated from the sealed record rather than from anything still editable. Owner or front desk records the payment.
Sealing also files the parts warranties, queues the customer's next service, publishes the repair to the vehicle's history, and — if you use QuickBooks — leaves the invoice ready to push across.
They get your shop code. From any phone browser they enter it with their VIN or the phone number on file and see the current status of their repair.
Who is here, what they are doing, and whether the numbers work.
Every shop is separated at the database level, not by a filter someone remembered to apply. A record belonging to another shop is not visible, not editable and not reachable, including by its id.