I hate my auto repair shop software, what else is there?
Short answerIn an auto repair shop, the records that matter most are vehicles, repair orders and estimates. Export those first, confirm the replacement can hold a vehicle per customer with its history, and run a full week of repair orders on both before cancelling.
The explanation
A shop's data model is vehicle-centered. One customer may have three vehicles, each with mileage, a VIN and years of service history. A generic customer list that cannot hold vehicles forces your service writers to type the same details again at every visit.
Ask the old vendor for a full export, including vehicles, repair orders and any inspection records. If part of the history cannot leave the old system, print or save it as PDF for active customers, so you can answer a question about last year's brake job.
Test with real work. Open five repair orders in the new tool, from estimate to invoice, and have the service writer and a tech use them. The moment of friction is usually in how fast the writer can pull up a vehicle.
What to watch for
- Moving customers without their vehicles.
- Letting the old subscription lapse before saving history.
In auto repair shop
Shops often keep recommended-but-declined work on a vehicle record to follow up later. Confirm the new tool keeps those notes, since they become future repair orders. All auto repair shop scheduling questions.
How Apex does it
In progress
Part of this is built. The rest is not. Status as of 2026-10-07; the badge shows the least-built feature involved.
Apex works toward an auto repair shop pack with vehicle records, plus customer import and CSV export. The pack is built as a screen, import and export are partly built, and none is connected to saved data yet.
- IP15Auto repair / shop pack (vehicle records)(Rolling out)
- LD15Customer import from CSV/other software(In progress)
- LD16Customer export (CSV) at any time(In progress)
Apex Flow Scheduler is in early access. See how we label status.
Where this question comes from: we wrote it from research on common owner problems. It is not measured search demand.
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