Features

Everything it does, in the order you do it.

A build starts as a quote and ends as a paid invoice with a photo record attached. BuildMonkey covers the whole of that, so nothing has to live in a spreadsheet beside it.

Start your free trial Start at the quote

14 days free · No credit card · Every screenshot below is the real app

The app’s left navigation: Dashboard, Calendar, Parts Manager and Reports above a Builds list of three cars, each with a coloured status dot. Ellis Fastback is expanded to show its Proposals, Tasks, Parts, Notes, Gallery, Invoices and Build Journey sections, with that build’s task board open beside it; Vaughn Bronco and Okafor C10 stay collapsed below. — The build rail, with one car open and its sections listed underneath.

01Find any car

Every build in the shop, one click from anything.

The rail down the left lists every car you have in. Open one and it unfolds into its own sections — proposals, tasks, parts, notes, gallery, invoices and the page the customer sees — so going from “how is the Bronco doing” to “what does the Bronco owe” is one click rather than a search. Only the car you are working on stays open, so the list is as short with thirty builds as with three.

One car open at a time, so the rail never becomes a wall of names
A coloured dot per build — on track, at risk, on hold — visible without opening anything
Every section has its own address, so a refresh puts you back where you were
Drag the list into the order your shop actually thinks in, hottest car at the top

A proposal for Phase 2 of a Mustang build, numbered P1042, marked Awaiting customer and totalling $50,430.40 pre-tax. Each package shows its scope as chips, an hours slider, a labor rate and a line total. — A priced proposal, package by package — the document the customer reviews.

02Quote it

A digital proposal the customer can actually read.

Build the quote from packages priced at hours × your labor rate, plus parts at cost with your markup — which the customer never sees. Send it as a link. They open it on their phone and review the whole scope: what each package covers, the hours behind it, and what every line costs. What they decide comes back onto the proposal, so the shop is holding a document instead of a phone call.

Every package shows its scope, its hours and its price — no lump sum to argue about
Several quotes per build — phase the work and price each phase separately
Proposal numbers come from a per-shop counter that only moves forward, so deleting a draft never lets the next one reuse a number
The proposal total drives the build’s budget bar, so job costing starts the day you send it

The Add packages overlay: a searchable library of restoration package templates — Tear down, Mock and initial design layout, Fabrication, Pre assembly, Final mock up, Body work, Paint - Polish, Reassembly, Tuning — each with its task count, plus a Blank group option. — The package library, with the task counts each one brings.

03Plan it

Start stocked, not from a blank page.

The work you quote over and over — tear down, body work, mock-up, paint and polish, reassembly, tuning — lives as a template library with the tasks and hours already in it. Add several at once and the build starts with its work listed.

Templates nest four levels deep, and every level lands on the board
A category tree you control, plus search across all of it
Add a blank group when the work is genuinely one-off
Editing a template never rewrites builds that already used it

The review step after dropping a supplier purchase order: PO-4488, and a table of parsed line items — quarter panels left and right, a trunk floor pan, a rear frame rail — each ticked to include, with its quantity and cost. — A supplier PO read into parts rows — nothing saved until you add them.

04Skip the typing

Photograph the paperwork instead of retyping it.

A supplier PO, the customer’s punch list, a page of handwritten notes — drop the file in and it comes back as rows to check. The PO becomes parts with vendor, quantity and cost. The punch list becomes packages and tasks for the board. Nothing is written until you say so, so what you are handed is a draft to correct rather than a mess to undo.

Photos, PDFs, Word files and plain text all go into the same drop zone
A PO fills in the parts, the quantities, the cost and the vendor’s contact details
A punch list becomes packages and tasks, ready to land on the board
Untick any line you do not want before a single row is saved
The original document is kept in the build’s gallery, flagged with what came out of it

Nested work under a parent that rolls up its children’s hours.

05Run it

Three hundred tasks, four levels deep, still readable.

Packages break the build into real work; tasks nest under them with an owner, a status, a due date and hours estimated against hours actually spent. A task with children becomes a read-only aggregate — its hours and progress roll up from the leaves — so the top of the board stays scannable while the bottom stays honest.

Assign to a person or to a whole department
Drag work between packages; sub-tasks follow their parent
Priority, due date and a media count on every row
Completed work folds itself away into a Completed section

The assignee menu open on a task row: a People list of five crew with their roles, then a Departments list — Paint & Body (ticked), Fabrication, Interior, Engine & Trans — each with its member count, above an Unassign option. — One picker, people above crews — this task belongs to Paint & Body.

06Split it by crew

Assign a department, not a person who might be off.

A task goes to one named person or to a whole crew. Paint & Body, Fabrication, Interior and Engine & Trans come set up — rename them, recolour them, or build your own. A department task shows for everyone in that crew until one of them clocks in and claims it, so the work reaches the bench instead of sitting in the inbox of whoever is on holiday.

People and departments in one picker — a task has one or the other, never both
A department task wears the crew’s badge on the board instead of a face
Whoever clocks in claims it; from then on it is theirs
Every crew member belongs to one department, and the picker shows the head count
Delete a department and it makes you say where its work goes, so nothing is orphaned

A task row for Replace quarter panels with its status dropdown open, showing the shop’s own status set — Not started, Up next, Waiting on parts (ticked), Stuck, Working on it, QC / Review, Done — and an Edit statuses option at the bottom. — The shop’s own status set, editable from the row it is used on.

07Name it

Statuses in your words, not ours.

Every shop has its own vocabulary for where a job is. Rename the statuses, recolour them, reorder them, add your own. Nothing downstream breaks, because the billing and completion logic keys off a status’s behaviour rather than its label.

“Waiting on parts”, “QC / Review”, “Stuck” — or whatever your board actually says
Task and part statuses are configured separately
Deleting a status in use makes you say where those rows go, so nothing is orphaned
The one status the system owns is Invoiced, which it sets itself and will not let you pick

The parts table for one build: Dynacorn quarter panels backordered to September, an LS3 installed, a Tremec shipped, each with vendor, quantity, cost, PO number and receive-by date, above a drop zone for auto-filling parts from a PO. — Parts on one build, above the PO drop zone.

08Source it

Know which part the build is waiting on.

Every part carries its own state and its own receive-by date. A stalled build says it is two backordered quarter panels rather than sending you to the phone. Photograph the supplier PO and the rows fill themselves in — vendor, part names, cost, quantities — for you to check before anything is written.

Needed → Ordered → Shipped → Backordered → Installed → Invoiced, and you can rename any of it
Cost and markup stay internal; the customer sees a price
Receive-by dates with an overdue hint, so a late part is visible before it is a problem
Vendors carry their own contact details, parsed off the PO

The Parts Manager showing 17 parts across 3 builds, with a designated parts manager and a tile filter carrying a photo of each car — the Mustang, the C10, the Bronco — plus vendor, status and due-date filters, and the parts grouped under each build. — Seventeen parts across three builds, filterable by vendor or by what is overdue.

09See all of it

Every part, every build, one screen.

Parts arrive for the car that is not in front of you. The Parts Manager is the whole shop’s parts in one place, grouped by build — so the question stops being “what is this build waiting on” and starts being “what is the shop waiting on”.

Order once across builds: filter by vendor and you can see everything owed by one supplier before you call them
Filter by receive-by date to find what is overdue anywhere in the shop, not one build at a time
Edit inline — the same row and drawer as the build’s own Parts tab, so there is nothing new to learn
Access is Admins plus the parts people you designate, so the person who chases parts does not need the run of the shop

The clock-in overlay titled “Pick what you’re working on”: a photo card per build — Ellis Fastback with 10 open, Vaughn Bronco with 2, Okafor C10 with 2 — above a separate “Not on a vehicle” tile for cleanup, training and meetings. — Clocking in: pick the car, with its open-work count on the card.

10Clock on

Clocking in is picking the car, not filling in a form.

The crew taps the car they are standing next to, then says how deep — the whole vehicle, or one package of it. Each card carries that build’s open-work count, and there is a tile for work that belongs to no car at all, so cleanup and training stop being logged against whichever job happened to be closest.

Pick the vehicle, then the package — no stack of dropdowns to work through
Non-billable work is its own choice rather than a workaround
A build shows a marker when somebody else is already clocked on to it
Which task the hours land on is chosen at clock-out, when you actually know
Clock out with a note — it is required, so hours arrive with a record attached

The timeclock report for one week: 100 hours clocked across 30 sessions, all unbilled, three technicians with per-person bars, and a session list showing build, task, times and billing state. — A week of shop time, with the unbilled figure that matters most.

11Track it

Hours to the second, with a note attached.

The crew clocks in on a task from their phone and clocks out with a note — the note is required, so what you get back is a record rather than a number. Hours land on the task, roll into the invoice, and sync to QuickBooks Online as real time activities under a job for that build.

Per-technician totals for any date range, with billed against unbilled
Every session names its build and its task
A department task shows for everyone in it until one of them clocks in and claims it
Billed sessions are stamped, so nothing can be invoiced twice

BuildMonkey on a phone: the dashboard with a greeting, the day’s work, and a bottom navigation bar with Home, Builds, Calendar, Reports and More. — The same shop, on a phone, with the bottom nav that replaces the sidebar.

12On the floor

Built for the phone in somebody’s back pocket.

Not a desktop layout squeezed onto a phone. Below the phone breakpoint the sidebar gives way to a bottom nav, the task list is built for one thumb, and the camera is one tap from the work it belongs to.

Clock in and out without finding a workstation
Shoot a photo straight onto a task, with a caption
My Tasks shows a tech only what is theirs, or their department’s
Sits above the iOS home indicator instead of under it

A build’s media library: a folder rail listing All Media with 8 files, Teardown & rust 3, Bodywork 2, Driveline 1 and Paperwork 2; an All / Photos / Documents filter; and cards for six workshop photos and two PDFs, several tagged Task, two tagged Posted to Journey, and the purchase order tagged Parsed with a View info button. — One build’s library — folders, the source of every file, and what has already gone to the customer.

13Keep the record

Every photo knows which car and which job it came from.

One library per build, in folders you name. A photo shot on a task from the floor, an image attached to a comment, the supplier PO dropped on the Parts page — all of it lands in the same place, and every file remembers who added it and what it came from. That record is worth money later: when the car sells, it is the provenance file.

Folders one level deep — Teardown, Bodywork, Driveline, Paperwork, whatever the build needs
A pill on the file says where it came from: shot on a task, parsed from a PO, published to the customer
Filter to photos or to documents; PDFs and spreadsheets live here too, not in a separate drawer
Open any file for who uploaded it, where it came from and when
The customer’s page publishes from this same library, so nothing is uploaded twice

The customer’s build page for a 1967 Mustang Fastback: a month-grouped timeline of updates, the latest headed “The LS3 is in the car” with a written summary, a photo of the engine on its mounts, the count of tasks completed and parts installed, the parts listed by name, and an invoice with its number and total. — The page the owner sees — updates, work completed, parts installed and invoices.

14Show the customer

A customer portal for the person whose car it is.

Every build has a private page the owner can open from anywhere. Publish an update and it lands there — the photos from the floor, what got finished that month, the parts that went on, and the invoices with the totals. They stop ringing the shop for a status, and nobody has to retype the same answer four times.

Photos, and a written update, grouped into a month-by-month timeline
Invoices they can open and read, with the total on each one
Parts installed and tasks completed listed on every update
Each post is a snapshot, so it still reads correctly a year later
A private link rather than a login — it opens on a phone and there is nothing to sign up for

And the parts of the job that happen away from a screen.

Bill it, in stages: Invoice whatever is finished, as many times as the build needs — installed parts at your markup, tracked hours at your rate. Partial payments accumulate, and every invoice carries a customer e-signature and a release of liability above the signature line. Invoice numbers come from a counter that only moves forward.
Know what it cost: Budget against actual on every build, live: budget from your approved quotes, actual from tracked hours at your rate plus parts at customer price. Plus reports for payroll hours by person, invoices issued in a range, and parts margin line by line.
Schedule it: Each person gets their real working week. A task with a due date and an hours target spreads backwards across the days it will actually take — 100 hours at 5 hours a day is twenty working days, not a dot on Friday — and over-booked days get flagged.
Keep notes: Rich-text notes per build with a shop-wide template library — the pre-delivery checklist, the customer’s standing instructions — copied in rather than linked, so editing a template never rewrites a note somebody already wrote.

The questions that come next.

Do I have to use all of it?

No. The board is the spine and everything else hangs off it — plenty of shops run builds and parts for months before they raise a quote in it. Nothing is required except a build to put work on.

Can my techs see the whole shop?

Only if you want them to. Roles decide who can price a job and who can just move work along; a technician gets My Tasks and their own clock, not the reports or the quotes.

What happens to a build when it is finished?

Archive it. It leaves every active surface — the board, the list, the calendar — and stays whole in the reports, so last year’s numbers do not change.

Does the customer need an account?

No. The quote and the customer portal are both private links. They open on a phone, and there is nothing to sign up for.

Is there a limit on builds, users or parts?

No limit on builds, packages, tasks or parts. Five users are included in the price; each one after that is $29.99 a month.

Put a real build in it.

Start your free trial

14 days free · No credit card · See pricing