Get Your Free Auto Repair Invoice for Teams Effortlessly

Free auto repair invoice for teams

so you want to write a body shop estimate but you don't want to pay for the expensive estimating software from mitchal CCC or autotex um this is a solution that I came up with it's not perfect by any means I've tried Excel Microsoft Word and several other templating platforms and they all have some very annoying problems that you run into like Excel deletes lines when you try to add letters to it unless you double click to get into the cell and there's a whole bunch of complexity involved especially like when you go to print Excel has a very loose definition of what a page and Page sizes are so the prints sometimes can be off um so first I went to Microsoft Word to try to resolve that situation U Microsoft Word has a nice document layout and it'll always prints the same way but what I found out is Microsoft Word mathematical calculations are pretty uh pretty hard to use too you have to use keyboard shortcuts to do the calculations and they can get off quite easily so um that really didn't work out what I found was Libra office and I'll show you the website here it's Libra office.org Libra office is the document Foundation for the open source community so it's really nice you can download the latest version right there what I like to do is come up here to the downloads Tab and on the very first option hit download Libra office and you'll see a couple versions here if you read into it it says this one down down here slightly older well that just means that it's the stable version so I definitely go with that one you get that downloaded and it the normal way you just click next next next next and let it based on the defaults and uh once you have it installed you can go to your desktop here I've provided you with a template and once you get that template downloaded double click on it after installing Libra office then it will open in Libra office here and you'll have something that looks like this it's pretty much like Microsoft Word you come in here and you just type what you want to type um I'm really slow at typing so I'm not going to make you sit through a lot of that um this it's originally it's designed to stay on one page however if you had if you needed to add more information somewhere in here you can always rightclick and then insert a row below or row above and you can add your info just like so add an input line in there I'm going to delete or I'm going to use contrl Z to undo what I just did so that it remains on one page at least for the demo here all right so oh also one more quick thing this is just a normal image so you can right click and click replace to put your logo image on there um same thing with the font you can you can delete this and and put your letters there your uh shop name there and then come over here for some reason this box at the top doesn't work did you come over here to the side and pick a font I like aial black pretty good actually um not not liking that too much let's go down here to I like this Tahoma that's the font that's used by CCC it just I don't know it just has a really nice appearance and then maybe even um italicize it possibly anyway all right let's get right to the estimate here so we're going to start at the front of the car replace the bumper cover and then because there is a rear bumper cover I like to just make a notation of f frt so that it's clear that it's a front bumper cover and then if you see these squiggly lines the spelling you can you can put add to dictionary and and you won't see that anymore all right let's say the part was $238 all right and then the labor to rni I overhaul the bumper covers roughly 2 hours and maybe add on 3/10 just to bolt it on and stuff so let's go 2.3 it would depend on the vehicle and then on the paint your first first panel bumper cover you're probably looking at at about 2 hours and then the setup so you're looking at about and the clear coat about three three to do the the paint workor and then your your paintwork on the next uh following lines you're not going to have as much per panel because uh if you read up on the Mitchell documentation which is kind of the gold standard in the body shop so so you look this up in the Mitchell guide um there's a there's several websites that talk about it but uh basically on the first major panel panel you charge for a complete setup and that's to like mix up your clear and and set up your paint station and everything and then you reduce that by percentage I think I think the maybe it's uh it's like between 20 and 40% that you reduce it from the paint times and then you add you know so much for the clear coats like 40 anyway I I forget the actual math so you just have to look all that up um but anyway uh there there is some overlap that you have to subtract and then and then uh and to be quite honest I usually just guess at it so just to get that out of the way now let's move on to the fender so we're going to replace the fender and then I'll usually do something like I did before notate that it's on the the front there is such thing as a rear fender let's say a Volkswagen Beetle FR for example has rear fenders um so let's do we'll do a front left on the fender and do a one I don't know let's see 132 45 just to make the math interesting and I don't know 1.2 to bolted on thinking of a little bit overlap because you already had the bumper cover off and this same thing with the paint um you've already got the overlap taken care of so all you need is the the paint time and the clear coat so you're probably looking at between 1.8 and 2.2 so I'm going to do like 1.9 um I don't even know what kind of vehicle I'm working on so it's kind of hard to say anyway so there you see the estimate um the paint rate is set by the by this hourly figure here so if you're painting rate in your area is different you would just change it there same thing with the labor rate let's say your labor rate was 75 change it there and then uh uh sales tax same thing here nine so that would be your grand total and uh now let's let's do one more thing because I have one more example that I want to show you so let's do head lamp um let's do left and then the parts let say the 122 and the labor to put them on because you already have your bumper cover off you're only looking at like 0.3 uh you could add 0.5 to aim the headlamps that'd be a good way to get some extra money but anyway so you've added that in and it reflected here on the total of the estimate all right and U but you decided you change your mind you wanted to remove a line so that's real easy to remove and I want you to keep an eye on these these figures down here all right so I selected that line and now I'm going to just hit delete to remove the contents of the cell if you'll notice them the mathematical uh calculations here didn't change that's because Libra office only does math when you enter calculations it's a little bit annoying but you do get used to it so all you got to do to make it do the deletion or the removal of the line is is to get it to recalculate the whole document again so you just add a zero and then hit Tab and then that zero causes the function to happen that recalculates the whole document then you can go back and just delete the zero no problem for you know for the print and now you have the right amount okay um so let's do a print preview real quick and then I'm going to show you how to add more lines to the document let's go to file print preview and there's what it's going to look like some of these ghost lines that are in the editor don't show up in the actual printed estimate which you know makes it look a lot better um I really like that and so what you can do let's say you got a really long estimate so you go through here and and by the way I always take a chunk out of the middle I don't want to copy any of the any of the bottom or the top lines now you can you can copy a line that has um contents in it it it won't copy down so so to add this many rows however many selected you just select them right click and insert you can insert them above or below and insert them below now you see the contents of that that line that was selected it it won't get pushed down here all right and you can see that it adds the the header to the next page I thought that was a nice touch and just to make it look like a good two-page esate I'm going to add some more rows by highlighting insert below and you see it also Auto numbers the lines which is nice and so so anywhere in here here you if you added a random part or anything any labor whatever let's say you added $67 worth and then as soon as you off click off that field over here or if you hit tab it's going to calculate it's going to add that in so no matter how many rows you put in here it's going to continue to to add let's put a big number in here so you can see the change all right it you can see quite a change in the in the calculations there now let's do a print preview real quick just to see what a two-page print preview looks like and that's that's kind of what you're looking at there um yeah so that's everything I can think of that should get you going at least get you started and uh uh good luck out there best of luck have a good day