The PDR repair order workflow, step by step
Every dent shop runs some version of the same pipeline. Making that pipeline explicit — stage by stage, with one owner per stage — is the cheapest operational upgrade available to a PDR business.
Why the workflow matters more than the tools
When a shop feels chaotic, the instinct is to blame volume. But the same thirty vehicles feel manageable in a shop with clear stages and unmanageable in one where "status" lives in three heads, a whiteboard, and a group chat.
A written workflow does two things: it makes the next action obvious for every vehicle, and it creates natural checkpoints where money — estimates, supplements, payouts — gets recorded instead of remembered.
Stage 1: Intake and drop-off
The repair order is born here, and its quality determines everything downstream. Capture the vehicle, the customer, the referral source, and the agreed scope the moment the car arrives. Shops that record the referral source at intake are the ones that later know which sources actually make money.
Stage 2: Scope and pricing
Whether it is a retail quote, a dealer rate, or an insurance estimate, the job’s value should be on the repair order before the first tool touches the panel. Price changes and supplements happen — the discipline is recording them as revisions, not overwriting history.
Stage 3: Repair in process
Assign one technician owner per vehicle, even when helpers are involved — split percentages can share money, but accountability should not be shared. The board should show who owns every car and how long it has sat in the stage, because aging work in process is where delivery promises quietly die.
Stage 4: Quality check
A dedicated QC stage — under the lights, panel by panel — costs minutes and prevents the two most expensive outcomes in PDR: a comeback and a walkaround discovery in front of the customer. QC is also the natural gate before a job can flow into payroll.
Stage 5: Ready, delivered, paid
“Done” is not one state, and treating it as one is how shops lose money at the finish line. Ready means the work is complete; delivered means the customer has the car; paid means the money is in. Separating them exposes exactly where dollars are stuck.
Once a repair order reaches its final state, it should feed payroll and profit reporting automatically. If closing a job and paying a tech are separate systems, the gap between them is where disputes grow.
Putting it on a kanban board
A kanban board is simply this workflow made visible: columns are stages, cards are repair orders, and moving a card is the status update. There is no end-of-day data entry, because working the board is working the process.
That is the design premise of SalesPass Kanban — the board, the payroll math, and the P&L all read from the same repair orders, so the operational picture and the financial picture always agree.
Key takeaways
- Define explicit stages from intake to paid, with one accountable owner per vehicle.
- Record referral source and scope at intake; record changes as revisions, not overwrites.
- Keep Ready, Delivered, and Paid separate — the gaps between them are where money hides.
- Choose tooling where moving the work IS the status update.