How New Concept Auto Increased Parts Profit 15% and Prevented $4,000 in Loss

Vicente Silva owns several busy auto repair locations. Like most multi-shop operators, he's constantly pulled between operations, team management, and keeping an eye on profitability. The data to answer his questions existed, buried somewhere in his SMS and financial systems. But extracting it? That was another story.

"Could I find these answers on my own? Yes, but it would've taken me over two hours. As a shop owner, we don't have time for that."

Vicente needed a faster way to get answers. Not dashboards to stare at. Not reports to export and manipulate. Just answers.

Running multiple locations means Vicente can't personally audit every parts invoice, every margin, every vendor credit. The critical insights were there, but getting to them required hours of manual work.

Simple questions like "What is our average cost in parts?" or "What is our average gross profit dollar amount?" shouldn't take half a day to answer. But with traditional methods, they did.

That meant Vicente wasn't reviewing his financial health frequently enough to catch hidden opportunities, or hidden losses. Small inefficiencies compounded across locations. Vendor errors slipped through. And without the time to dig, he had no way of knowing what he was missing.

Vicente started using WickedFile's Ask Navigator, an AI-powered tool that lets shop owners ask business questions in plain English and get answers in seconds.

No more exporting data. No more building custom reports. Just type a question, and Ask Navigator analyzes SMS data across all locations, delivering clean, segmented, actionable insights.

"I want to ask a question and get it. WickedFile does it within seconds."

When Vicente asked about his parts costs and gross profit, the answers came back solid overall. But Ask Navigator flagged something he wouldn't have caught on his own: specific parts categories with slightly underpriced matrix markups.

"It literally told me, you might want to look into your matrix pricing."

Vicente made a small adjustment. Less than one percent. A micro-tweak to his matrix pricing on the flagged parts categories.

The impact was immediate.

"We saw a 15% increase in parts profitability within the same month, and the month wasn't even over yet."

A tiny change, surfaced by AI, unlocked significant margin gains across his locations. And it took seconds instead of hours.

But that wasn't all WickedFile caught.

Using the platform's Risk Detection feature, which monitors for profit leaks across people, processes, and vendors, Vicente discovered a vendor billing error that would have cost him nearly $4,000.

A vendor had issued a defective part. The return was processed, but incorrectly, flagged as a defective part credit rather than a full return. WickedFile caught the discrepancy by cross-checking the ingested data against the vendor statement.

"We run through so many parts that we don't realize what's being charged. Without WickedFile catching it, we probably would have paid for another one unnecessarily."

That's $4,000 saved from a single flag. And Vicente now has confidence that hidden profit leaks aren't slipping through the cracks.

The total impact:

• 15% increase in parts profitability from a <1% pricing adjustment
• $4,000 in vendor billing errors prevented
• 2+ hours saved per analysis cycle
• Greater confidence in financial decisions across all locations

For Vicente, WickedFile has become his AI-powered business partner for operational decisions.

"I really like just overall the feature of it, and the fact that within seconds it's going through your data. It's massive."