Customer approval

Customers never log in and never install anything. The text link opens a branded page with everything they need to say yes.

The approval page

• The plain-English report: what is wrong, why, the evidence, what happens if it waits, an urgency badge, and whether the car is safe to drive.
• The itemized estimate: parts, labor, fees, tax, and the total.
• Per-item Approve and Decline buttons, so the customer can say yes to the brakes and hold off on the cabin filter.

Choices stay marked as selections until the customer signs and submits at the bottom of the page; the page says so on every selected item, and a bar at the bottom keeps pointing to the finish step. Approving requires typing their full name as an e-signature. CarSignal records the name, timestamp, device, and consent text, which satisfies California BAR-style authorization requirements.

Questions without phone tag

I have a question opens a chat. An AI answers instantly, grounded only in this quote and report. Anything it should not answer gets deferred to you: the customer sees "checking with the shop," and the question lands in your inbox to answer in the same thread.

Declines

A decline can include a reason and marks the work deferred, not deleted. Declined services show up later in Outreach follow-up, so the work is not forgotten.

The moment they approve

Automatically, without another shop step:

1. You get a notification: Quote approved, $842.50.
2. The work flips to approved and the car moves to In shop, next action Order parts.
3. A draft invoice assembles itself from all approved, unbilled work.
4. If your shop allows slot picking, the customer's chosen time is booked on the schedule with capacity checked.
5. The customer gets a confirmation text and email, and their link becomes a live status tracker (Approved, Scheduled, In progress, Ready, Completed) that updates as you work.

The chosen time is checked again when approval lands. If another booking took the capacity first, CarSignal keeps the approval, leaves the work unscheduled, and asks for another time instead of force-booking the shop. A customer moving an existing appointment gets the same hours, lead-time, time-off, and bay checks; the original appointment link stays valid and the new time starts a fresh confirmation cycle.

Changing work after approval

An approval holds to the amount the customer agreed to. Money roles can still add to an approved job, but if the add raises the price, CarSignal asks how the customer authorized the increase before it lands on the bill: record that they said yes in person or by phone, capture their signature at the counter, or send an updated quote for them to approve fresh. Whichever you pick is stamped on the job's history with the old and new amount, so the bill always matches what the customer authorized. Removing work or lowering the price needs no extra step, since the customer already agreed to more.

The same rule protects a signed invoice: change it after it's signed and the signature clears, so the customer signs again for the new amount before paying.

Sent quotes are protected the same way, before approval: once a quote goes out, the jobs on it are locked. Changing one voids the quote first (the customer's link stops working), then you make the change and resend. The customer can never be looking at a price that's being edited underneath them.

Mobile service visits

When the visit carries a service address, everything the customer reads follows it: the quote page asks when works for the shop to come to them, the live status page says "we'll come to you at your scheduled time," and the finished-work message says the car is all set instead of ready for pickup.