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I work at Mikes Automotive. If you do not count me then it is a family owned business and has been around for about 10 years now. About a year ago Mike opened a second shop across town to help with all the excess work. We use different types of office automation and group collaboration software to communicate between our two shops and its employees.
We use Microsoft Excel to come up with our estimates for the customers. Unlike other automotive shops in our area we do not calculate each estimate by hand. Most of our competitors do not take in account for rising prices or any kind of specialized work that has to be done on a vehicle. At our shop we feel that our pricing should reflect current parts and labor prices. We use a template and enter the parts that are needed into an excel file. The prices that are set by the suppliers automatically show up for the parts that are needed. We also use excel to input all of our customer information. If for some reason we need to pull up a customers information Microsoft excel makes it easy to do that. There are some downfalls to excel though. For example, Microsoft Excel only allows you to input so much information for a customer. Everything is printed through Microsoft Word therefore repetitive data entry takes place because all of the calculations are always done through excel.
We also use Microsoft Word in our shops. We use Word to write up all of our sales tickets after importing the prices from excel. We print these tickets and it has all the information on it for the customer. We can even email a copy of the sales tickets to the customers if they prefer it. This also makes it easy for the two shops to email information back and forth rather than having to call and then write everything down. Microsoft Word is also used to fill in vehicle information for the mechanics and a place for the mechanics to input everything they did for that job. Word has many different templates that you can choose from or you can create your own if you prefer. On the website there is also a form the customer can fill out if they want an estimate of what.
All of these different types of programs help our shops to run smoothly. If it were not for Word, Excel, and QuickBooks our business would not be as organized as it is. So even though we have to do a lot of extra data entry, it is well worth it in the long run. After going through all these programs for this assignment though maybe I should talk to the owner about linking all of our programs somehow so there is less data entry.