How to schedule car drop-offs at your garage

In a garage, the booking is rarely the job itself: it is the moment the car arrives. The simplest way to schedule is to split your work in two. Jobs where the customer leaves the car get a drop-off window with a set number of cars, for example four cars between 8 and 9 am. Jobs the customer waits for, like a tyre change or a bulb, get exact slots at the length they take. Add what you need to know in the booking note, and plan the tyre-change weeks and other peaks before they arrive.

A service can take one hour or four, depending on what you find once the car is on the lift. A clutch job can turn into a two-day job if a part is missing. If you try to book the exact duration of every job in advance, the day falls apart by 10 am, and customers who arrive on time wait for their slot.

What you can control is the flow of cars coming in. You know how many cars your team can work through in a day, and how many can sit in the yard. Booking the drop-off turns that knowledge into a schedule: customers choose when to arrive, and you decide how many arrive at once.

On Book, each of these is a service with its own description and an optional price. For the drop-off service, open one slot per window and set the number of places to the number of cars you can take: each customer books one place, and when the window is full it disappears from your page. For while-you-wait jobs, open slots at the real length of the job and keep one place per slot, or two if you have two bays free for quick work.

Start from your real capacity rather than from demand. Count the technicians working that day, the lifts available and the yard space, then subtract the jobs already in the workshop from the day before. If you usually get through eight cars a day with two technicians, two morning windows of four places each is a reasonable starting point. Leave some space for the car that turns out to need more work than expected.

You can adjust day by day. On a day when one technician is off, open fewer places. On Friday afternoon, when you want the yard empty before the weekend, don't open a drop-off window at all.

The booking form asks for first name, last name, email and phone, plus an optional note. Use the service description to tell customers what to write in that note:

With that, you can order parts before the car arrives, or call back the customer whose note shows the job is more than a quick look. You receive an email for each new booking, which is a good moment to check the note.

Where seasonal tyres are common, the weeks around the change of season are a peak for tyre fitters and garages. They come back every year, so they can be prepared. A few weeks before, open dedicated tyre-swap slots on the days you want, as a separate service with its own description ("bring your tyres", "wheel locking nut key needed"). A slot created once can be repeated on the weekdays you choose until an end date, which fills the whole period in one go.

During those weeks, you can pause long jobs by simply not opening drop-off windows for them, and add early or late slots for tyre swaps rather than squeezing them between other work.

Customers who call or walk in don't disappear. When you agree a time with them, book it yourself from your calendar: the place is then taken and no longer offered online. If you work as a mobile mechanic or fit windscreens at the customer's address, open slots only on the days and areas you cover, and ask for the address and parking details in the note.

Book handles the booking, not the job's progress: it doesn't send a "car ready" message. Keep calling or messaging customers when their car is done, as you do today. If a booking has to move, for example because a part hasn't arrived, reschedule or cancel it from your bookings list and tell the customer yourself, since Book doesn't email them when a booking changes.

All of this costs €5/month, everything included: unlimited bookings and services, no commission and no contract.