What does one day look like when bookings, the dyno and the car share a portal?

Some tuning businesses never see a car. This is about the other kind: a workshop with a ramp, a dyno in the back and a paper diary by the phone. Two people work there, the owner and a technician, and on most days three or four cars come through the door.

The paper diary is the centre of that shop, and it has the faults paper has. The Saturday slot is given twice, once on the phone and once by the form on the website. The registration is written in the diary, typed again on the job, and typed a third time on the dyno printout. And the customer drives away with a car that pulls harder and nothing in their hand but a receipt.

Here is the same day with four parts of the portal doing that work: the diary, the car's page, the dyno sheet and the reviews. Each links to the page that describes it in full.

What does the morning look like?

The owner opens Bookings, the one page of the workshop diary. The top of it is today: who comes in next and in how long, the day drawn as a strip of slots with the booked ones marked, and who of the team is in.

Under that sits What needs you, the short list that must not be forgotten: a booking nobody has spoken to yet, a job today with nobody assigned, and a job handed to someone who is away that day. Each line opens the booking it is about. This morning there are two. A booking came from the website overnight and wants a call, and Thursday's job is on the technician's day off, so the owner moves it.

That second warning comes from the Staff rota, an add-on that keeps who works which day beside the bookings. The page is clear about its reach: the rota warns and does not close anything. A holiday on it stays on sale on your website until you also block that time on the calendar. So when the shop shuts for a week in August, the owner blocks the week on the calendar, and no website offers time the shop does not have.

How is a booking taken while the customer is on the phone?

At ten the phone rings. A man with a diesel estate wants to know what a tune would give him and whether Friday is free.

The owner answers the first question from the Vehicle Hub, the page that exists for exactly this call. There are three ways to find the car: by number plate, when the portal has a plate provider set up; by Quick search, typing the model and engine the way a customer says it; or step by step, from the type of vehicle down to the engine. The page then shows the car: its data, stock power and torque, each stage with its gain, the ECU and the tools that read it, and the notes the team has written about that car.

Two details keep the answer honest. The source of the figures is named: your own measured dyno run when you have published one for that engine, a verified curve when one is on file, the catalogue's reference figures otherwise. And the gains are labelled as estimates unless you have a measured run. The owner reads the stage one figures down the phone as what they are.

At the bottom of the page is Quote: stock, each stage with its gain, and the price each starts from, taken from the shop's own price list. Download quote PDF makes it a document with the shop's brand on it. A quote is a starting price, not an order.

The man says yes to Friday. The owner presses Add by phone in the diary, also opened with the N key: the customer, the phone, the day and the time, the registration with a button that fills in the car from the plate, the work, the price quoted and who is doing it. The booking is in the list, on the calendar and in Friday's strip. A plate looked up earlier in the Hub opens from the portal's own store, without a second paid lookup.

The lookup has a cost worth knowing. A provider charges you for each new plate, so the page tells you to set a daily limit on new plates. Make and model work without a provider at all.

What stops the website giving the same slot away?

In the old shop this was the Saturday problem. In the diary, bookings come in through three doors and land in the same list: the phone, the booking form on your own website, and the same form on a dealer's website. All three share one capacity. A slot given on the phone is gone from the website the same moment.

The shop sets the shape of its day once in Diary settings: the days it is open, the first slot and the time the last job has to end by, how long a slot lasts, how many cars fit in one, the notice it needs and how far ahead it takes bookings. Online booking has its own switch. Phone bookings work from the moment the Workshop diary is on, and the owner ticks which staff roles have it.

Each website gets a key of its own, so every booking says where it came from, and one website can be switched off without touching the others.

For the day when a regular must be squeezed in, a tick on the phone form lets you book into a full or blocked-out slot on purpose.

What happens when the car arrives?

Friday, nine o'clock. The estate is on the strip at the top of the page, and its booking has everything for the conversation at the counter: the car, the work with the exact figures the customer was quoted, where the booking came from, their history with the shop and what else is in that day. If he is late, the buttons to ring, WhatsApp or email him are on the same page, and WhatsApp and Email open with the shop's own message already written, the name, the time and the car filled in.

The technician reads the ECU and the job goes through the portal as any file does. The diary page puts it in one line: the booking sits on that car, so the file request that follows is never typed a second time. The diary is not a till, though. The price on a booking is the quote you typed, and the money is taken on the job and its invoice as usual.

How does a dyno run become something the customer keeps?

After the tune the car goes on the rollers. The dyno prints its own sheet, with the dyno maker's logo. The shop wants its own.

Dyno Studio makes it. On a job, the request page has a dyno sheet section: the car and the ordered stage are already known, so the peak figures and a curve are filled in from the vehicle data, and the technician corrects them to what the dyno measured. Run details first, then the conditions, then the peaks. Where the dyno gave a full trace, it is pasted in as columns of revs, stock and tuned power, and optionally torque.

The portal does not connect to the dyno or read its runs live, and the page says so. Figures are typed, filled in or pasted from the dyno's export. A curve drawn only from peak figures is a drawing, not a trace, and the simple sheet says so in a second note under the graph.

Before publishing, the preview checks the technician's work. If the gain is above the shop's warning line, set apart for turbo and non-turbo cars, or the tuned curve dips under stock, the technician is told and decides. It is a prompt, not a lock. Only a curve with fewer than five points, or revs that do not rise, is refused.

A sheet starts as a draft only the team sees. Publish, and the customer gets an email with a PDF link and a notice in the portal, and the sheet appears on their request with the figures and the graph. When the final figures are in, the technician locks the sheet so they cannot change by mistake. If a figure was wrong, Create new version corrects it and the old version stays in the history.

How the sheet looks is set once, in Dyno sheets and certificates: the style, a simple one-page sheet or a detailed report, the units, the correction standard, the name printed on it, the contacts and the disclaimer. With Tuning certificates on, a certificate for the delivered file sits beside it on the customer's request page.

There is a quieter gain. A dyno run you published for an engine replaces the reference figures for that engine in the Vehicle Hub. The next caller with the same estate hears the shop's own measured numbers.

How does the day end with a review?

The customer collects the car at four with the PDF already in his inbox. That evening the delivery email has also invited him to rate the file once it is on the car.

Reviews from customers belong to a job, not to a site the shop does not control. The customer rates the file with one to five stars and a comment if they want, on the page of that job. Only the person who ordered it can rate it, and only once. The technician assigned to the job and the administrators are told in the portal.

What other customers see is narrow on purpose. Their dashboard can show a Latest reviews panel: the car, the stars and the words of recent reviews that clear the shop's star floor and that the owner has not hidden. No name, no email, no plate and no chassis number is printed there. The floor never removes anything; a review under it stays on the shop's own page.

The dyno sheet can ask for a rating of its own: with Rating before dyno sheet on, the customer sees a row of stars on their published sheet until they have rated it.

For the review that needs a look, the page describes the habit. Press the car to open its job, hide the review with the eye, and answer the customer in the job's conversation. There is no public reply box under a review. When the matter is sorted the customer may edit their review, and the owner shows it again.

Last thing, the owner closes Friday's bookings as Completed, Cancelled or No show. The slot frees itself, and the finished ones are there to export as a spreadsheet: the name, the contact details, the car, the work, the price and who took it.

What does this day still need from the shop?

• A plate lookup needs a provider you set up, who charges for each new plate.
• The gains in the Hub are reference figures until you publish a measured run for that engine.
• The rota is a week of shifts, not a timesheet. It records no hours worked and no pay.
• Reviews are shown on your portal, to signed-in customers. Putting them on your own website is not something the function does.
• A dyno sheet is passed on as its PDF, and the link in the publishing email works for a day. After that the customer signs in and downloads it.

The registration was typed once, on the phone. By Friday evening it had carried a quote, a booking, a job, a dyno sheet and a review, and nobody wrote it down a second time.