Manage customers and vehicles

Every repair order belongs to a customer and a vehicle. Getting that link right means the next time the customer calls, their history is already there.

Customers are records, not logins

Customers never sign in to Openhood. They approve quotes and view status through secure links you send them. There is no customer password, no customer account.

This is why your job is to keep the customer record clean: the record is the single place their contact details, vehicles, and history live.

Find anyone fast from the Customers tab

The Customers tab on the dashboard is the front-office lookup surface. Search matches whatever the caller says first: customer name, phone, or email, but also vehicle registration, make, model, VIN, repair order number or status, and even words from past messages.

The table itself keeps raw phone numbers and emails off the shared screen. Compact icons show that a contact method exists; the actual details live in the customer drawer.

1. Open the Customers tab and type anything the caller gives you: a name, a rego, a phone number.
2. Select the row to open the customer drawer. It is one scrollable record: contact details, vehicles with their repair orders nested underneath, invoices, communications, and contactability.
3. Fix contact details on the spot. Edits show explicit Save and Cancel, so a half-finished change never saves itself.
4. Text the customer from the drawer if you need to. The composer opens blank with your workshop's template pills available, so nothing is pre-filled by accident.

Create or match a customer

When you take a call or book a vehicle in, Openhood looks for an existing customer before creating a new one, so you never build a duplicate just because the caller used a different detail this time.

1. Open the Customers tab or start a new repair order.
2. Search by name, phone, or registration. If the customer already exists, select them.
3. If there is no match, create the customer with their contact details. Phone numbers save in a standard international format automatically.
4. Add business and alternative-contact details where relevant. These belong on the customer record, not in repair order notes, so they are there next time.

Vehicle ownership follows the car

A vehicle's registration is unique within your workshop. When the same registration comes back under a new owner, Openhood relinks ownership rather than creating a duplicate vehicle, so the car keeps one continuous service history. This happens automatically wherever a rego is entered: at intake, when attaching a vehicle to a customer, and during imports.

Past repair orders are never rewritten when ownership changes. Each visit stays attributed to the customer who authorised and paid for it. The vehicle history follows the car; the billing history follows the person. In the drawer, a vehicle under a previous owner is marked as prior ownership so you can see why it appears in their history.

Import customers from a spreadsheet

Owners and admins can bring an existing customer book across without hand-typing it. Imports are staged, so nothing touches your live records until you have reviewed what will land.

1. From the Customers tab, choose Import customers.
2. Upload the spreadsheet and map its columns to Openhood fields. Non-standard exports are fixed here, not in the file.
3. Review the preview. Duplicates are grouped as warnings, and you can exclude noisy rows individually while blockers stop the apply until resolved.
4. Apply the batch. Re-uploading a revised spreadsheet later refreshes the same records instead of duplicating them.

Who can do what

• Service advisors and above can create customers during a call. This is everyday front-office work. Lead technicians can also correct customer details when they are running the front counter.
• Archiving, deleting, and spreadsheet imports are admin and owner work, because they can change many records at once.

Archiving is the normal way to remove a customer. It hides them from search and new repair order matching while keeping their history intact for disputes, recovery, and audit. The Customers tab has a deliberate Show Archived mode for finding them again; archived records open read-only with contact actions disabled. A true delete is only possible for empty test or duplicate records with no real history attached.