Review live production and follow-up queues daily, completed-work bottlenecks and margins weekly, and summary, trend, source, and retention reports monthly. Keep projections separate from collected money, and finish with a specific action someone owns.
Choose a useful cadence
A reporting routine should end with a decision, not a larger spreadsheet. The daily review answers what needs attention now. The weekly review asks why the same problems keep returning. The monthly review checks whether the shop is moving in the right direction.
- Daily: identify blocked repairs, overdue follow-up, and promises at risk.
- Weekly: examine delays, margins, estimate approvals, and the customer experience.
- Monthly: compare performance, work sources, returning customers, and longer-term trends.
Use this as a starting routine, not a requirement to open every report. A small shop may combine reviews. A busy location may split them between production, parts, and the front office. Match each report to a person who can act on it.
Daily: choose the next action
Start with production reports. WIP by Stage shows the work currently on the floor; Blocked and Waiting helps identify repairs that cannot move forward. Open the relevant RO before making a promise. A count of delayed cars does not explain which part, approval, or decision each one needs.
Use Parts Aging, Parts by Vendor, and Sublet Aging to build the day's vendor calls. Use Unapproved Supplements to focus insurer follow-up. Contact Aging identifies open repairs that have gone without a customer text, including customers never texted. These are working queues, not a scorecard of completed performance.
Review near-term promise dates with Projected Deliveries and Billing, then check outstanding balances separately in A/R Aging. Agree who will resolve each exception and when they will report back. Avoid reading every row aloud; spend the meeting on the repairs that need a decision.
Weekly: investigate patterns
Look at the completed work as well as today's queue. Cycle Time shows arrival-to-delivery time. Stage Dwell reconstructs where delivered cars spent that time. Read it alongside Hours by Stage and Touch Time to distinguish recorded work from waiting. A slow stage is a prompt to investigate, not proof that a technician worked too slowly.
Review labor, parts, and vendor reports for recurring friction. Parts Profit separates vendor cost from the amount billed. Vendor Reliability can reveal backorders, returns, invoice mismatches, or slow sublets. Vendor Credits and Cores keeps money owed back separate from received goods that still need an invoice.
Check estimate and insurer reports for approval patterns. Estimate Conversion and Supplement Performance answer different questions: whether written estimates become authorized jobs, and how supplement requests move through review. Compare similar periods and look at the number of jobs behind a rate before changing a process.
Monthly: check the direction
Begin with Monthly Summary, using a complete month where possible. Review the change against the preceding month, then investigate the underlying reports. A partial month should not be treated as a full month's result.
Shop Trend uses nightly snapshots of WIP, late work, ready vehicles, WIP dollars, and delivered dollars. Delivering a repair today does not erase yesterday's delay. Missing or partial history is flagged; do not read a gap as a sudden improvement or collapse.
Next, use customer and business growth reports. Where Work Comes From shows delivered work and sales by intake source, alongside carrier concentration. Customer Retention distinguishes returning customers and vehicles from new business using the shop's history. Customer Value adds the value of that work. These are different views of the business, not interchangeable measures of profitability.
Read survey comments alongside satisfaction scores. Choose one change worth testing next month, such as clearer delay updates or a tighter vendor follow-up process, and decide how you will review it.
Keep the numbers in context
Check the report's date range, included jobs, and calculation basis before comparing numbers. Live worklists describe the shop now; historical reports describe selected periods. They do not necessarily contain the same repairs.
Profit, billing, and collection reports also answer different questions. Projected Deliveries and Billing groups pre-tax approved job value by promised delivery week. It is not collected cash. Payments Received identifies money received, refunds, and reversals, with deposits and progress draws distinguished from other payments and write-offs kept separate.
Gross Profit includes modeled labor costs based on booked hours and configured rates, not actual payroll. Labor Hours records job timers, not attendance. Labor Efficiency flags jobs that cannot be scored because tracking is incomplete. Missing time must not look like exceptional productivity.
Paint Materials can use PPG mix cost or modeled cost when mixes are unavailable. PPG mix data typically arrives within an hour of the last spray; report costs freeze when the RO closes. Know which basis you are reading before interpreting a margin change.
An example morning review
Imagine three cars are promised for Friday, but one is waiting on a backordered part. The projected billing total alone cannot tell you whether Friday is realistic.
Open the blocked repair, confirm the supplier's latest ETA, and decide whether the promise date needs to change. Assign the vendor call and customer update. Recheck the queue after those actions. At the weekly review, examine whether the same supplier or part category is causing repeated delays.
The daily report gets a repair moving. The weekly report helps improve the process around the next repair.
Leave with an owner and a date
Use this short checklist to keep reviews practical:
- Confirm the date range and flag missing or provisional information.
- Pick the exceptions that could change today's work or this week's results.
- Open the source repair, estimate, or vendor record to understand the cause.
- Record the next action, its owner, and a due date.
- Start the next review by checking those commitments.
For a repeatable review, select a small set of reports and create a branded PDF pack with its date range and the person who produced it. Export CSV files when you need further analysis. Share only the information appropriate for the audience; report access in AutoHound follows role and shop permissions.
You do not need to review 50+ reports at every meeting. Start with the questions your shop needs answered, then use the report that helps someone take the next useful action.
Report definitions and details
The AutoHound examples in this guide follow the current Reports catalog. Review each report's definition and your shop's recorded data before drawing conclusions.