For independent garages

Shop management software for a small independent garage

Fixty is built for one mechanic working alone. If your garage has a counter, a parts shelf and technicians splitting a job between them, this is the wrong tool, and the rest of this page is about which ones are not.

The phrase people type is shop management software for a small independent garage. The honest answer, for most of the people typing it, is not Fixty.

A garage that is running properly needs a few things this product does not have. Work divided between named technicians. Parts counted on a shelf and reordered when they run low. The day taken off the board and dropped into the bookkeeping without anyone retyping it. Fixty tracks one job, one estimate, one inspection, one invoice and one payment, for one person. That is the whole shape of it, and it is deliberate rather than a gap being hurried closed.

So this page does the thing the rest of your search results will not do: it tries to talk you out of it first, and it names the software you should be looking at instead.

A day in a one bay garage

This is the version of a shop day that Fixty actually fits: one person, one bay, keys handed over in the morning and back in the afternoon.

  1. The car arrives

    The job goes on the board with the customer and the vehicle attached. If the car has been in before, its history is on the vehicle record: what you did, what you charged, what you told them was coming.

  2. Before you start

    The estimate goes out as a link while the owner is at work. They approve the lines they want from their desk, and the job is set to approved without a phone call either of you had time for.

  3. While the car is up

    The inspection is done on the phone, with photographs. The second job gets sold by the picture rather than by a speech at the counter, which is the one shop advantage a solo operator can actually match.

  4. Waiting on a part

    You set the job to waiting on parts. It is not finished, it is not forgotten, and the status change is in the job history if anyone asks later when it stalled.

  5. Handing the keys back

    The work order becomes the invoice with every line carried over, and the customer pays by link. No card terminal, no printed ticket, no evening spent copying tickets into a spreadsheet.

What a one person garage actually gets

Each row is an axis Fixty is measured on across this site, so the wins below are printed from the same record as the losses further down.

Job pipeline board

Cars in the lot, cars on the lift, cars waiting on parts and cars waiting to be paid for, on one board instead of on a whiteboard nobody updates after lunch.

Digital estimates and quotes

Labor at your rate, parts at your markup, tax on the items you have marked taxable, built from a service library rather than typed fresh every morning.

Photo vehicle inspections

Included on every plan, not an upgrade.

Photographs are how a small garage earns the trust that a dealer buys with a waiting room. They cost you nothing and they travel to the customer by text.

Card payments

Stripe, paid from the same link as the estimate.

A payment link is a card machine you did not lease, and the payment lands attached to the job that earned it.

Price published without talking to sales

You can see the price of this software on the pricing page and decide alone. Several of the products aimed at your garage will not quote you without a call first.

The four rows that will decide this for you

These are not caveats at the bottom of a page. For a garage, each one is a reason to close the tab, and the caveats are printed straight from the record every comparison table on this site reads.

  • Multi technician teams: no

    One mechanic, one workspace. Built solo first on purpose.

  • Parts inventory management: no

    Fixty tracks parts on a job, not stock on a shelf.

  • Accounting sync: no

    No QuickBooks or Xero integration today.

  • Tire and wheel shop tools: no

  • There is no service writer view and no counter mode. One workspace, one login, and sharing a login between two people is not multi user support no matter how it is sold.
  • There is no time clock, no technician efficiency reporting and no payroll. If you measure billed hours against clocked hours, that number does not exist here.

If two of those are true of your garage, skip down to the section that names the three products built for a shop like yours. Nobody is well served by you finding this out after you have already moved your customer list.

What shop software is actually selling you

It is worth being precise about what the category does, because the feature lists all blur together and the thing they have in common is easy to miss.

Shop management software sells a shared queue. Somebody at the front takes the call, writes the ticket and promises a time. Somebody in the back picks the ticket up, does the work and hands it back. The software is the seam between those two people: it is what stops the front desk promising a car back at a time the bay has not started, and it is why every one of those products is organized around repair orders moving between named humans.

Everything else the category sells hangs off that seam:

  • Parts inventory exists because the person ordering is not the person fitting, so the shelf has to be a shared fact rather than something one mechanic knows.
  • Technician assignment and efficiency reporting exist because somebody is accountable for hours that somebody else worked.
  • Accounting sync exists because the volume is past the point where one person retyping it in the evening is sane.
  • The counter workflow exists because a customer is physically standing in front of somebody who is not the mechanic.

Fixty sells none of that, because it assumes there is no seam. One person takes the call, writes the estimate, does the work and gets paid, so there is nothing to hand across and nothing to keep in sync. That is a real advantage when it is true of you, and a hole straight through the middle of the product when it is not.

Which is why the test is not a feature comparison. It is one question: is there a handover in your garage? If there is, buy for the handover.

What the other names in your search results are built for

Three of the products a garage owner meets in this search are genuinely shop native. Below is each one describing its own buyer, quoted from its own website with the page and the date, alongside the cheapest price it publishes without a sales call. We did not paraphrase any of it, and where a company does not publish something, the cell says we could not confirm it rather than guessing.

Tekmetric

Who they say it is for

Auto repair shops of every size. Their own estimate FAQ says that set includes mobile mechanics alongside single shop businesses and franchises.

“Yes! We proudly support more than 15,000 shops including mobile mechanics, single shop businesses, and franchises. Tekmetric is cloud-based so you can access Tekmetric from anywhere on any device.”

tekmetric.com/feature/estimate-building, read August 29, 2026

Cheapest published monthly price

$179 per month

“Tekmetric starts at $179 per month when billed annually.”

tekmetric.com/ai-info, read August 29, 2026

The one to look at first if the reason you are shopping is that two people need to work the same repair order.

Shopmonkey

Who they say it is for

Auto repair shops of every size, from a single shop to franchise groups

“Built for every type of shop, whether you run one or a thousand.”

shopmonkey.io, read August 29, 2026

Cheapest published monthly price

$215 per month

“Simple pricing for auto repair and shop management software. Shopmonkey offers plans starting from just $215/month with annual pricing discounts.”

shopmonkey.io/pricing, read August 29, 2026

Built around the shop as an organization, up to groups of them. Heavier than a one bay garage needs, and honest about who it is for.

AutoLeap

Who they say it is for

Auto repair shops of every type and size, from a single bay to multi location franchises, with mobile mechanics listed as one of the shop types they serve.

“From a single-bay shop to high-volume quick lube, from mobile mechanics to tire shops managing seasonal inventory, AutoLeap is built for how your shop actually runs.”

autoleap.com, read August 29, 2026

Cheapest published monthly price

$179 per month

“Power your shop with #1 Auto Repair Software starting at $179/mo. Flexible monthly and annual plans designed to streamline operations for shops of any size.”

autoleap.com/pricing, read August 29, 2026

Names the single bay shop and the tire shop in the same breath, so a small independent garage is inside their stated market rather than at the edge of it.

We sell competing software, so read those quotes rather than our summary of them. Each links to the page it was taken from.

The garage Fixty does suit

There is a real version of a small independent garage that this fits, and it is worth naming precisely so you can tell whether it is you.

  • You rent a unit and you work in it alone. The building is where the tools live, not where a team works. What you needed was never shop management, it was a way to stop losing jobs and chasing money.
  • You went back to working solo on purpose, after a crew. You know exactly what you are giving up, and paying for seats and shop reporting you no longer use is what you are trying to stop doing.
  • Most of your work is mobile and the unit is for the jobs that cannot happen in a driveway. Fixty was built for the mobile half and does not mind the other half.
  • You have a helper who hands you tools and does not write repair orders. That is one person writing the work, which is what this product assumes.

What all four have in common is that one person is accountable for every job from the estimate to the payment. The moment that stops being true, the software you need is a different category of thing.

Questions people ask before they sign up

Can two of us use the same Fixty account?

There is one workspace and one login. Two people can share it, but nothing in the product knows which of you did what, jobs cannot be assigned, and the history will not tell you who changed a status. That is not multi user support and we are not going to describe it as though it were.

Does Fixty sync with QuickBooks or Xero?

No. There is no accounting integration of any kind today. Invoices and payments live in Fixty and somebody moves the numbers across by hand.

Does it do parts inventory?

No. Parts are line items on a job: description, quantity, price, taxable or not. There is no stock level, no reorder point, no supplier record and no purchase order.

We do shop work and mobile calls. Does that change the answer?

It can. If the mobile side is the growing half and one person runs it, Fixty fits that half well and will not get in the way of the rest. If the shop is the business and the van is an errand, buy for the shop.

Are shop features coming?

We are not going to give you a date, because a roadmap is the cheapest thing a software company can hand out and the easiest to quietly drop. Buy Fixty for what is on this page today, or buy something else.

What does Fixty cost, if we do decide to try it?

Starter is $99 per month with a 14 day free trial, and a card is collected at signup and charged on day 14. Growth is $149 per month and is billed in full at signup with no trial. Cancel any time; access runs to the end of the cycle you paid for.

Still think it fits?

The trial is the real test, and it takes one job to run it: put the next car through Fixty end to end, estimate to payment, and see what it cannot do while it is still cheap to find out.

Try Fixty free for 14 days