Manage customers and vehicles
Every repair order belongs to a customer and a vehicle. Getting that link right means the next time the customer calls, their history is already there.
Customers are records, not logins
Customers never sign in to Openhood. They approve quotes and view status through secure links you send them. There is no customer password, no customer account.
This is why your job is to keep the customer record clean: the record is the single place their contact details, vehicles, and history live.
Create or match a customer
When you take a call or book a vehicle in, Openhood looks for an existing customer before creating a new one. Search matches across name, phone, email, vehicle registration, make, model, and even repair order details, so you can start from whatever the caller says first.
- Open the Customers tab or start a new repair order.
- Search by name, phone, or registration. If the customer already exists, select them.
- If there is no match, create the customer with their contact details. Phone numbers save in a standard international format automatically.
- Add business and alternative-contact details where relevant. These belong on the customer record, not in repair order notes, so they are there next time.
Preferred contact is operational, not consent
You can route messages and calls to a customer's primary or alternative contact. That routing is separate from marketing consent, which is tracked on its own. Choosing where a message goes does not change whether the customer has opted in to anything.
Vehicle ownership follows the car
A vehicle's registration is unique within your workshop. When the same registration comes back under a new owner, Openhood relinks ownership rather than creating a duplicate vehicle, so the car keeps one continuous service history.
Past repair orders are never rewritten when ownership changes. Each visit stays attributed to the customer who authorised and paid for it. The vehicle history follows the car; the billing history follows the person.
Registration lookup at intake
At intake you can look up a registration to pull in vehicle details and current registration status. An unregistered or suspended result shows a clear warning before anyone drives the car.
Who can do what
- Service advisors and above can create customers during a call. This is everyday front-office work.
- Archiving, deleting, and spreadsheet imports are admin and owner work, because they can change many records at once.
Archiving is the normal way to remove a customer. It hides them from search and new repair order matching while keeping their history intact for disputes, recovery, and audit. A true delete is only possible for empty test or duplicate records with no real history attached.