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by cucumber3732842 88 days ago
There's a lot of stupid keyboard punching that you need to do to create a proper quote. You can't do that from under a car.

Someone comes in for a timing belt on a car that needs timing belts. Ok, you've got the parts and labor on the belt itself, those are easy to just look up from a table. But, do you just replace the belt, replace other things related to it as well, or perhaps even go above and beyond and proactively do a water pump or something while you're in there. That's gonna depend on the relative cost/labor differences of those, the customer's intentions, the value of the car, etc.

What you really need is someone to answer the phone, pull all that info and then say "hey Jim there's some guy on the phone who needs X, the options are" and then run down all the reasonable combinations and let the tech exercise judgement. This is basically what the service writer does but ideally they get good and don't need to bother the tech for "minor" judgement stuff.

And that's all assuming that this is a cookie cutter job.