Six work providers, six different stopwatches
A new job lands from one of your insurer work providers at ten past four. Their agreement says the customer must be contacted within a set window, the estimate and images must be in their portal within another, and the customer should hear from you at points during the repair. The accident management company that sent a job an hour earlier has different windows, different definitions of when the clock starts, and a different portal to prove you met them.
Your front of house team knows most of this by heart. They know which provider counts the weekend and which does not, which one wants a call rather than a text, and which one sends a stern email when an update is a day late. What they cannot do is hold forty open jobs across six providers in their heads while also answering the phone, booking in cars and handing keys back.
So the deadlines get met most of the time and missed some of the time, and you find out which when the monthly scorecard arrives.
The rules live in agreements, not in the system
Bodyshop management systems are good at recording what happened to a job. They are less good at knowing what should happen next for this particular work provider, because the rules sit in service level agreements, onboarding packs and emails from the account manager, not in a field anyone can report on.
- Clock start differs: the time of notification, the time the job was accepted, or the time the customer was first reached.
- Some providers count working hours, some count calendar hours, and bank holidays are treated differently.
- Updates are required at stages (parts ordered, repair started, ready date changed), not only at the end.
- Evidence has to go into the provider's own portal, so a phone call logged in your system does not count unless it is also recorded there.
When one person leaves, the unwritten version of those rules leaves with them.
What a missed clock does to the relationship
Work providers measure you. Late contact, late estimates and missed updates show up in their performance reporting, and bodyshops that sit near the bottom of a provider's table tend to get fewer jobs, harder audits or awkward review meetings. You rarely lose the work over one late estimate, but the pattern is what gets discussed.
Inside the shop, the cost is the scramble. Someone spends the morning going through the portal to see what is overdue, the estimator is interrupted to finish an estimate that was due yesterday, and the customer who did not get a call at the right time phones the insurer rather than you.
How we build a deadline timer for each work provider
- We write each work provider's rules into a small rules table: what starts each clock, how long it runs, whether it pauses outside working hours, and what counts as meeting it.
- New jobs are picked up as they arrive, from the provider's notification email, portal export or your management system, whichever gives the earliest reliable time.
- Each job gets its live clocks: contact due, estimate due, next update due, with the provider's own names for them.
- A board for front of house sorts every open job by the clock closest to breaching, colour coded by provider.
- When a stage changes in your management system (parts ordered, car in the booth, ready date moved), the next update clock starts and a draft message is ready to send.
- A weekly view shows which clocks were met late and why, so you can see whether it was workload, a missing image or a provider rule nobody knew about.
| Moment | Today | With the timer |
|---|---|---|
| New job at 4.10pm | Added to the diary, clock guessed | Clocks start using that provider's rules |
| Friday afternoon | Someone checks the portal by hand | Board shows what breaches over the weekend |
| Ready date slips | Customer finds out when they ring | Update clock starts, message drafted |
| Monthly scorecard | First sight of late jobs | Already seen and explained week by week |
The timer does not submit anything to a provider portal on its own unless the portal offers a proper route for it. Where the portal is manual, the board tells someone exactly what to enter and when.
A normal morning once the clocks are visible
The first person in opens one screen and sees the six jobs that need contact before lunch and the two estimates due by mid-afternoon. The estimator knows which estimate to do first without being asked. When a provider's account manager calls about a late update, you can see when the stage changed and when the message went out.
New staff learn the providers from the rules table, not from overhearing. And when a provider changes its agreement, one line changes rather than everyone's memory.
Signs your shop has this problem
- You repair for several insurers or accident management companies with different agreements.
- Checking what is overdue means logging into more than one portal.
- The monthly performance report is the first time you see a missed contact deadline.
- Only one or two people really know each provider's rules.
- Customers ring the insurer for an update because they did not hear from you.