Talk about a waste of time— rekeying estimates and entering them into estimating systems costs body shops around the country on average over $20,000 each year!
Yes, you read that correctly. You are literally throwing out $20,000 in revenue each year, not to mention the extra money you could earn by not having your valuable employees stuck in front of a computer all day. Think about it— would you rather have your estimators and general managers contacting customers and providing phenomenal customer service or staying behind the scenes doing data entry? Based on Estify’s research, an average shop rekeys three estimates per day. At an average of 45 minutes per estimate, that time really starts to add up!
What could you do with that extra money? Update your equipment with cutting edge products, give raises to employees who deserve it, I hear Hawaii is nice this time of year…
Curious how to get that money back and avoid useless rekeying? Estify Transfer is here to save the day! Upload any insurance estimate to their website or snap a picture with Estify’s handy app and in no time, the digital estimate will be emailed to you. A process that takes an average 45 minutes to complete has been reduced significantly with Estify’s magical product. It not only allows you to forget about rekeying, but also enables you to get back to revenue generating duties in your shop.
“Rekeying is a money pit, and it’s taking estimators away from things they could better spend their time doing - tasks that could generate revenue for the shop or improve customer satisfaction,” believes Dan Austin, Executive Vice President of OEM Strategy at Estify.
The Problem: Failure to Adapt
Let’s face the problem together. Cars are becoming so complex and intricate that it takes next level effort and comprehension to ensure every vehicle is being fixed perfectly. You and your technicians are trained to fix cars. Why put more on their plate by throwing in data entry on top of the already complicated repair process?
Rekeying adds unnecessary steps to the collision repair process and is completely useless. Even working within the same system, rekeying still needs to be performed. In fact, Austin says 48 percent of estimates fall into this category. This shines a light on what a large problem and time waste this is.
“Our industry is based on multiple systems that need to communicate with each other and they unfortunately, don’t do a very good job,” Austin says. “Communication between estimating systems is just something that doesn’t happen, and the industry has accepted that.”
Many in the industry are still manually rekeying estimates because that’s the way it’s always been done, explains Austin. We do not need to continue to live in the painful past.
The Solution: Filling in the Gap
Estify Transfer takes over the rekeying process and Steven Mcnamara, National Collision Operations director at Sonic Automotive in Houston, says that it’s something that his estimators have been extremely grateful.
“It lightens the load of our estimators on the admin side and it’s expensive for the shop to do it internally. Now, my estimators have more time to generate revenue. They can write better supplements, spend time looking up repair instructions and do more high-level things that are actually in their job description.”
Mcnamara, who has been using Transfer since early 2016, says that each of his estimators save about an 1–1.5 hours per day by not having to rekey estimates. With Transfer, an estimate can be scanned and uploaded to the user’s Estify account. A prompt will then ask the user which estimating platform the estimate should be rekeyed into. Once submitted, Estify’s magic green elephant goes to work. This allows staff to do other work while the estimate is being processed and can expect the estimate to be returned quicker than if it was rekeyed manually.
The Result: Time Well Spent
Austin concludes by stating a simple fact:
“Most people in body shops have very specific jobs and to take them away from their revenue generating tasks to do data entry is a waste of time. Bottom line, everyone in this business is looking to make money. Let your employees get back to that and Estify will take care of the data entry.”
Come see Estify for yourself at NACE Automechanika on July 26 in Chicago.
