E-Res Auto — auto service management

The challenge

An auto-service shop is hard enough to run on its own — bookings, jobs, parts, mechanics and invoices, usually scattered across spreadsheets and disconnected tools. But E-Res Auto is really three businesses in one: a service shop, an insurance brokerage, and the ITP inspection and back office that hold it together — spread across two companies. There was no single view of the shop, the customer or the books.

What we built

One connected system on Podio that runs the whole business, not just the workshop. Every customer and every vehicle is a single record the entire company works from, and two lifecycles run on top of it: booking → job → invoice → daily report on the service side, and lead → quote → policy → renewal on the insurance side — backed by a deep layer of custom automation that does the repetitive work and keeps the numbers honest.

How it fits together

The customer and their vehicle are the spine; everything else attaches to them:

• The workshop. Service quotes (constatări) become work orders that track parts and labor separately, each job attributed to a named mechanic — so the shop can see labor profit per technician. Warranty returns, parts orders and a seasonal tire hotel all hang off the same vehicle.
• The insurance desk. Web, phone and email enquiries become client records and feed a quote pipeline that ends in an issued RCA / Casco policy, with the broker’s commission tracked on every one.
• The back office. Jobs turn into revenue and job-costing reports, which roll into a daily profit-and-loss card and a month-end balance sheet consolidated across both of the group’s companies — alongside payroll, expenses, suppliers, commissions and KPI dashboards.

Automation doing the heavy lifting

40+ custom integrations and automations take the manual work off the team:

• Profit per mechanic. Every work order books its labor to a specific technician, so each day’s numbers — and the job-costing reports — break out profit by mechanic.
• Leads that don’t go cold. Website and email enquiries automatically become (or match to) a real client record and land with the sales team, with a follow-up chaser for anything left untouched.
• Insurance renewals on autopilot. Fifteen days before a policy expires the system drafts a renewal quote, assigns an owner the next day, and escalates to management if it’s still untouched — so renewals don’t slip.
• Expiry tracking with reminders. Every vehicle’s RCA, ITP and Rovinietă dates are tracked with one-tap SMS reminders, backed by per-channel customer consent (GDPR-clean).
• One-click documents. Repair orders, vehicle-reception and damage-assessment sheets, written offers, tire-storage labels and the legal custody-handover protocol are generated pre-filled and filed straight back onto the record.
• Receivables that chase themselves. Unpaid invoices are aged automatically (30 and 60+ days), flagged and routed to the right person to collect.
• Payroll, commissions and timesheets. A payroll run explodes into per-employee records, collaborator commissions are generated from verified invoices, and each working day is closed and locked so the figures roll cleanly into reporting.
• Clean data by default. Phone numbers are normalized to international format for messaging, and VINs and plates are validated and standardized on the way in.

More than a workshop

What began as a service-shop system grew into the operating system for the whole company: around 47 connected apps across three Podio workspaces — operations, management and accounting. Month-end produces a board-level snapshot — liquidity, solvency and bottom line — computed natively in Podio across both companies, with supplier ledgers, promissory notes, checks and a cash register all reconciled in the same place.

By the numbers

A snapshot of what the system carries today:

• 13,800+ clients and 11,000+ vehicles in one shared history.
• 15,000+ service quotes turned into work orders and invoices.
• 2,500+ warranty and return cases traced back to their parts and suppliers.
• ~2,000 tire sets logged in and out of the seasonal tire hotel.
• 1,400+ insurance quotes run through the brokerage pipeline.

The result

E-Res runs its service shop, its insurance desk and its back office from one system. The team processes 43,000+ work orders with full visibility into each mechanic’s profitability, never misses an insurance or inspection deadline, and closes every month with a consolidated set of books — without re-keying a thing.