Fleet software?

[K A Hall]

Need some ideas:

This guy I know does mobile auto and truck repair. He is currently hand writing all of his invoices and then filing them away. He does some contract work for some small and medium size businesses that have fleets of trucks or vans. When he has a broken down vehicle in one of these fleets or even on an individual’s car and wants to see what he has done on said vehicle in the past, he has to go to the office and dig through the hard copies.

What he would like to do is be able to look at this information when he actually on the site that the repair is to be made. I cannot think of way for this to work without scanning each ticket in and putting them in folders by company name and then searching through them by vehicle ID or truck number. I have played around with this and it just takes too much time and really does not work that well.

I guess what I am looking for is some kind of software that they could use on either laptops or some kind of hand held device and type this information in instead of hand writing the invoices. Actually any ideas are welcome.

[lil Jimmie]

I sure wish my boss would do something like that, but he won't touch a computer.

I did a search for "automotive invoice software" on google and did see some that have trial downloads.

[glc]

Have you tried a standard small business accounting program like Quickbooks or Peachtree?

[K A Hall]

He is using quickbooks now to keep track of the invoices, but the details of each invoice are not entered. Only the total amount owed and some general information. At least I think that is the way he is doing it. We would like to try and avoid somone else having to enter in every detail at the end of each day or a few times a week.

Mechanics using laptops or something similiar might be a little awkward as well. Can you imagine what they would look like after a week or so. Messy.