How Ace Auto Doctor & Repair Stopped Losing $1,000 - $3,000 a Month to Missed Credits

Dustin runs an eight-bay auto repair shop that's been in his family for generations. His grandmother and father built the business together, handling everything from the front counter to the back-office books. Today, the shop employs two master technicians, two B-level techs, two apprentices, a shop foreman, and three service advisors, servicing around 200 cars each month.

It's the kind of shop where family does the work that needs doing. For years, that meant Dustin's grandmother came in to reconcile invoices alongside his dad, matching papers to papers, digging through filing cabinets when something didn't add up.

But Dustin's dad was ready to retire. And Dustin was ready to take over.

The only problem? The back office was still stuck in the 1990s.

Like most family-run shops, reconciling parts invoices was a manual, paper-heavy process.

"It was all manual," Dustin explains. "My grandmother was actually doing it for us with my dad."

When something needed to be tracked down - a warranty claim, a vendor credit, a missing core - it meant a trip to the back room.

"It used to be we had to go back to the filing cabinet or go to the back room and start opening up boxes and searching through thousands of papers to find things."

Every shop owner knows the shelf. The one in the corner where unreturned cores pile up, where credits slip through the cracks, where money quietly disappears.

"I know every shop owner has this part shelf where stuff doesn't get returned and ends up with cores sitting on it."

Cores were getting scrapped that should have been returned. Warranty parts were written off instead of credited. And with manual processes, catching those mistakes in time was nearly impossible.

When Dustin's shop went digital with their point-of-sale system, they realized the back office needed to follow. That's when they found WickedFile.

"The remote access was definitely the turning point for us," Dustin says. "We already went remote with our point of sales system. And it made it so we could do that with all our bills."

Implementation was straightforward. WickedFile connected to their existing systems and immediately started matching invoices to repair orders - no more paper-to-paper reconciliation.

"We're not matching papers to papers no more. I mean, we can go in there and a couple flicks of the mouse and mark it off or decide we need to go check into that."

For Dustin, one feature stood out above the rest: instant document retrieval.

"Being able to look up past receipts, I mean, that's probably the best part about the whole thing. When I have a warranty job and I got to prove to the dealer that I bought it from them, because they're saying they can't find the paperwork where I bought it, I can instantly pull it up and email it over to them."

The impact was immediate. Within the first month, WickedFile was already paying for itself.

"We started seeing it the first month, I would say. It basically cleared that shelf for us minus a few parts, even back parts. We were able to get rid of some of them because of it."

When Dustin ran the numbers on what they'd been losing to missed credits, scrapped cores, and billing errors, the answer was sobering.

"It definitely pays for itself. I mean, we were probably losing about $1,000 a month, I would say, on the low side. And on the high side, I would say $2,500, three grand a month."

That's $12,000 to $36,000 a year in recovered profit - from a single-location shop doing 200 cars a month.

But for Dustin's family, the real win wasn't just financial. It was freedom.

His grandmother's workload dropped. "My grandma's stress level and having to come in as much has gone down, which is nice for her to have some more freedom."

And his dad? He finally got to retire - on his own terms. Today, Dustin's dad is spending three months in Arizona. He can check on the business from anywhere.

For shop owners still running on paper - or wondering if it's worth making the switch - Dustin's advice is simple:

"I would say go for it if you're looking to get away from paper and everything's going paperless these days, this is going to be the best way to do it and probably your cheapest option to do it."