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.

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01Quote it

A quote the customer approves line by line.

Build the quote from packages priced at hours × your labor rate, plus parts at cost with your markup — which the customer never sees. Send a link. On their phone they approve or decline each package and each part individually, type their name, and the whole thing locks.

Per-line Authorized and Declined badges, so a half-approved quote is a legible document rather than an argument
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 authorized total drives the build’s budget bar

A proposal for Phase 2 of a Mustang build, numbered P1042, totalling $50,430.40 with $43,220.58 authorized. Three packages carry green Authorized badges; each shows its scope as chips, an hours slider, a labor rate and a line total. — A quote the customer has partly approved — the state a shop actually looks at.

02Plan 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 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.

03Run 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

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

04Name 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

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.

05Source 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 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.

06See 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 Parts Manager showing 17 parts across 3 builds, with a designated parts manager, a tile filter for All builds plus one per build, 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.

07Track 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

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.

08On 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

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.

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.
Show the customer: Publish a progress update — photos, parts installed, hours, what got done — and send them a private link. Posts render as a month-grouped timeline, and each one is a snapshot, so it still reads correctly a year later when the build has moved on.
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.
Document it: A gallery per build with folders. Photos shot on a task, images attached to a comment, POs dropped on the parts page — all of it lands in one place, each carrying who uploaded it and what it came from. When the car sells, that is its provenance.
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.
Read the paperwork: Photograph a supplier PO and it becomes parts rows. Drop the customer’s punch list and it becomes packages and tasks. Hand it a page of notes and it becomes a structured note. Nothing is written until you have reviewed it.
Split it by department: Paint & Body, Fabrication, Interior and Engine & Trans come set up — rename, recolour or replace them. Assign a task to a whole department and whoever clocks in claims it, so the work reaches a crew rather than a person who might be off.
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. Quotes and build pages are 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.

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