Guide /
Digital whiteboard for auto repair and body shops
What the shop whiteboard gets right, why it stops being true by Thursday, and what a digital board has to show before a crew will trust it: cars, stages, waits and late work.
Almost every shop has run on a whiteboard at some point: a column per stage, a magnet or a sticky note per car, and a morning meeting in front of it. It works better than most software, for a reason worth keeping when you replace it.
What the whiteboard gets right
It is one picture. Anyone can read it from across the shop without logging in or opening anything. A tall column is a pile-up, and you see it before you read a word.
It costs nothing to update. Moving a magnet takes a second, which is the only reason anyone does it.
Everyone sees the same thing. The writer, the techs and the owner argue about the same wall.
A digital board that loses any of these three will be ignored, however many features it has.
Why it stops being true
Magnets move when someone remembers. On a quiet Monday the wall is right. By Thursday the wall and the floor disagree, and the morning meeting runs on the wall.
Waiting is invisible. A car waiting on parts and a car being worked on sit in the same column. Nothing on the wall says which one is stuck, or for how long.
It has no memory. Once a magnet moves, nobody knows how long the car sat in paint, or which column ate the week.
It only exists in one room. The front office, the owner at home and the customer on the phone cannot see it, so somebody walks over and asks.
What a digital whiteboard needs to show
- One card per car, with the year, make, model and the day it was promised.
- Your stages as columns, in your order and your words, not a vendor's template.
- Waits as lanes, so a car waiting on parts or on an approval looks different from one being worked on.
- A time limit per stage, so a car that has sat too long finds you instead of the other way round.
- The same board on every screen: the bay phone, the office computer and a TV on the wall, updating live.
- A move that takes a second, one tap on a phone, or the crew goes back to the magnets.
What to leave off the wall
Prices and customer names do not belong on a screen the whole shop and every waiting customer can see. The wall needs the car and where it is. Everything else belongs one tap deeper, on the job itself.
How to switch in an afternoon
- Write down the columns you already have on the wall. Those are your stages.
- Add the cars that are in the shop today, one card each.
- Put the board on the shop TV where the whiteboard hangs now.
- For the first week, one rule: the card moves when the car moves.
- Take the whiteboard down when nobody has looked at it for a week.
How Carvikon does it
Carvikon is a job board built to replace the whiteboard. It arrives with the stages your trade already runs, and you rename, reorder and add to them. A card is a car: type a VIN or just "2019 Honda Accord" and it fills in the rest. On a computer you drag a card to its next stage; on a phone you tap the arrow to send it forward. Waiting on parts or approval is a lane under the stage, and each stage can have a time limit that flags late cars.
For the wall, open the board, choose Show on TV and pair the TV with the code it shows. The TV updates by itself whenever anyone moves a car, and it shows each vehicle's year, make, model and stage, with no customer names or prices. Nobody signs in on the TV.
Plans start at $49 a month for one shop. Reports on how long cars sit in each stage come with Pro and Elite.
Questions shops ask
If more than one person needs to know where a car is, yes. The whiteboard's problem is not size, it is that it stops being true and nobody outside the room can see it. A digital board that moves with one tap keeps the whiteboard's speed and fixes both.
Not with Carvikon. You pair the TV once with a code, and it shows the live board by itself: each vehicle's year, make, model and stage, without customer names or prices.
Yes. You start from your trade's usual stages and rename, reorder or add to them, so the board reads like the wall it replaces.
It is kept. Every card records the time it spent in each stage, which is what a whiteboard can never tell you, and what shows you which column is the bottleneck.
Rather see it first? Book a live demo