Get your shop live

This is the owner and admin journey. First you build the workshop the rest of the team will work in, then you run one real vehicle end to end yourself, then you step back to oversight. Work the stages in order; each one is what the next stage depends on.

Stage 1: Create your workshop

Your organisation is the container for everything else: your bays, your billing, your team. Pricing is based on active bays, not seats, and you start on a trial.

1. Sign up and create your organisation, then tell Openhood how many active bays you run.
2. Add your payment details. Billing starts after the trial, and the subscription is shown before anything is provisioned.
3. Add your workshop details. Onboarding keeps your progress, so you can stop and come back.

Full walkthrough: Create your workshop. How bays drive price: Subscription and bays.

In the product: finish onboarding until you land at Bookings.

Stage 2: Set your calendar

The shop calendar holds your standing trading rules: open hours, breaks, public holidays, and closures. The Booking Diary and Bay View derive the day's available hours from it, so set it before you take bookings against capacity.

1. Open Workshop Settings and go to Calendar.
2. Assign each weekday to a schedule option and check the derived available hours.
3. Subscribe to your state's public holiday calendar so closures import themselves.

Full walkthrough: Set up your shop calendar.

In the product: Workshop Settings, Calendar.

Stage 3: Invite your team

Each person gets their own account and a role that decides what they see. Technicians and detailers sign in on a phone with a one-time access pass you issue at the counter.

Full walkthrough: Invite your team. Who can do what: Team and roles.

In the product: Settings, Team & Access.

Stage 4: Load your catalogue and templates

The catalogue is the work you sell; templates are the checklists your technicians run. Both feed everything downstream: bookings pull services from the catalogue, inspections run against your templates, and quotes seed from findings.

1. Add your service types with code, hours, price, and their parts. The Template action seeds a starter catalogue you can edit.
2. Review the standard inspection templates copied into your organisation, and edit or build your own with sections, items, and severity modes.
3. Add your parts suppliers so quote lines and job parts can name a real supplier.

Full walkthroughs: Service catalogue and pricing, Build an inspection template, Manage suppliers.

In the product: Settings, Service Catalogue and Inspection Templates.

Stage 5: Turn on customer messaging

Customers never log in. They confirm bookings, sign the intake authorisation, approve quotes, and receive invoices through secure SMS links, so the site's messaging number is required infrastructure, not an optional extra.

Full walkthrough: Set up customer messaging.

In the product: Settings, Communications.

Stage 6: Run one vehicle end to end

The fastest way to learn the operating loop is to drive it once yourself. Book a vehicle in with the intake panel, arrive it, inspect it, quote it, and take the payment.

1. Book the vehicle in. See Create your first repair order.
2. Arrive it and issue the intake authorisation. See Process an arrival.
3. Run an inspection and record findings. See Run an inspection.
4. Quote the findings and send for approval. See Build and send a quote.
5. Finalise the invoice and record payment. See Finalise an invoice and take payment.

In the product: open the intake panel from the dashboard and book a real or test vehicle in.

Stage 7: Step back to oversight

With the loop proven, your job becomes watching it run. The dashboard is one live page: Diary for forward load, Arrivals for the morning, Active Jobs for in-flight work, Bay View for the floor. Everyone sees the same state without refreshing.

Full walkthroughs: Live dashboard basics, Schedule work in Bay View.