Customer approval

Customers never log in and never install anything. The text link opens a branded page with everything they need to say yes.

When a shop revises approved work and the amount goes up, the customer gets a re-authorization text or email: "Hi Sarah, the Brake pads on your 2019 Honda CR-V changed. Please review and approve: [link]" (no line items and no totals in the message). The link opens a page of its own, not the estimate: A change to your Brake pads, the changed lines (old to new), the job's price before and after, the invoice total before and after, your approval terms, and Approve (signed, the same way the estimate page signs) or Decline, with one line about the rest: everything else you approved stays the same. After Approve the page lists every job now approved on the visit with its price and the visit total, the customer gets "Thanks Sarah, the change to the Brake pads is approved. We're on it and will text you when it's ready.", and your bell reads "Sarah approved the change to Brake pads (+$30.00)". Declining leaves the originally approved work in place and lands in the job's history as the customer's decline. A revision that lowers the amount can go out the same way as an updated quote, a new version of the estimate: your earlier approval stays on record for the work and amount you already agreed to until you approve the new version, which then takes its place. Meanwhile the shop can Record approval on its own screen: the same counter screen a first approval uses, with who said yes, how (in person, by phone or by text), the customer's drawn signature when they are in the shop, and your approval terms. Record approval, on quotes and on revised jobs alike, is the Record customer approvals in shop switch on the Team page: on for admins and service writers, grantable to anyone; without it the door is absent and only Send remains.

The approval page

The page reads like a printed estimate from your shop: your name and address at the top, the vehicle, who it was prepared for, and an estimate number the customer can quote back to you. It prints like one too: the page's Print opens the estimate PDF, and the browser's own Print or Save as PDF gives a clean document, not the screen (no buttons, no boxes, your letterhead and page numbers).

• Services listed one per row with a plain-English title, a short description, and the price. A discounted job shows its original price struck through beside the new one, and the summary lists the total savings as its own Discounts line, so the customer always sees the deal. The printed estimate and the PDF strike the original price on each discounted line the same way. Parts & labor opens the line detail (parts, hours, fees, discounts) for customers who want it; the report (why, evidence, what happens if it waits, safe to drive) lives in the same fold.
• What we found sits above the services when the estimate went out from an inspection: every Monitor and Needs attention line with its reading, note and photos, a link to the full report, and under each service the finding it answers ("Found during the inspection: Front brake pads 2mm"). A recommendation nobody has priced yet reads Price to follow, never $0, and cannot be approved until the shop prices it and sends again.
• Approve and Decline on every row, so the customer can say yes to the brakes and hold off on the cabin filter. A selected row reads Selected. Select all for approval takes the whole list in one tap.
• Approve or Decline on a service moves the page along by itself: the next undecided service slides to the middle of the screen, and after the last decision the page lands on the review block (total, then signature). Nobody scrolls to find the next step.
• Your selection on the right (below the list on a phone): the selected services, shop supplies, fees, tax, and one Total. A flat shop supplies or environmental fee is charged once per visit: it rides in full on the first job the customer approves and adds nothing when they approve more later. A percent fee follows the approved parts and labor. Nothing is sent until the customer signs and presses Approve $1,242.51 (the button carries the exact total). Until then it says the one thing still missing: Sign above to approve, Add your name to approve, or Pick a time to approve when your shop lets customers choose a time. On a phone the button alone sits in a bar pinned to the bottom of the screen, above the browser's toolbar, so it is never below the fold after signing. While services are still undecided the same bar carries the running total and jumps to the next one. On a desktop the selection stays beside the list as the page scrolls, with the button pinned to its bottom edge, so it is on screen before and after signing; a short browser window falls back to the same bottom bar.

Approving takes one signature: the customer signs in the box (their name is filled in above it) and presses Approve. The moment the signature lands, a line under the box reads Signed. Press Approve to send it to the shop, and one quiet line above the button states that signing authorizes the selected work for the total shown. That signature then prints on the approved estimate, its PDF, and the customer's status page, the same way an invoice carries its signature. Parts work also offers Save my old parts as a quiet tick; Why? opens the one-line explanation. The press is instant: the button holds, a check draws itself in place with Approved beside it, and about a second later the page fades to the confirmation, opened at its top, while the approval is recorded. If the shop changed the quote in the meantime, the page comes back with the fresh figures and says so, and the customer signs again for the new amount. CarSignal records the drawn signature, name, timestamp, device, and consent text, which satisfies California BAR-style authorization requirements. No payment is taken on this page.

If you wrote Approval terms (Settings, Quotes and invoices), they sit directly above the Approve button as checkboxes in your own words, for example "I authorize the bodywork listed above, agree to the quoted price, and understand that full payment is due upon completion of the repairs." Every shop starts with one optional term, Save my old parts (the replaced-parts box the page always had; ticking it is the save-parts election): keep it, reword it, remove it, or add more. A term you marked Required holds the button (it reads Agree to the terms to approve) until it is ticked; an optional one is the customer's choice. The exact wording they ticked is kept with the approval, so a later edit of your terms never changes what an earlier customer agreed to. Record approval in person shows the same checkboxes on your screen. A phone running the app from before approval terms cannot show them, so its in-person approvals and counter signatures still go through and the record says Terms not shown (phone app) in place of the Agreed lines until the phone updates. A shop with no terms sees no change.

Questions without phone tag

I have a question opens a chat. An AI answers instantly, grounded only in this quote and report. Anything it should not answer gets deferred to you: the customer sees "checking with the shop," and the question lands in your inbox to answer in the same thread.

Declines

A decline can include a reason and marks the work declined, not deleted. Declined services show up later in Outreach follow-up, so the work is not forgotten. When the customer tells you no at the counter or on the phone instead of using the link, record it with Decline on the job card on the vehicle page; it lands in the same place.

The moment they approve

Automatically, without another shop step:

1. You get a notification: Quote approved, $842.50.
2. The work flips to approved and the car moves to In shop, next action Order parts.
3. A draft invoice assembles itself from all approved, unbilled work. Shop supplies and the environmental fee are per visit, not per approval: the bill carries one shop-supplies charge up to your cap and one environmental fee, and later estimates on the same visit are priced that way too, so work approved later adds only its own price and tax once the fees are on the bill. A later estimate says so where the customer reads it: its page, PDF and the in-app preview keep a Shop supplies row and an Environmental fee row (the amount this estimate adds, or On this visit's invoice when the bill already carries the fee) and a Tax row even when the new work is untaxed ($0.00), so the total the customer signs is never a bare labor figure. Record approval shows exactly what the approval adds to the bill before you confirm, with the same three rows on every approval (On this visit's bill when this approval adds nothing to a fee). Nothing already approved ever goes up because of this.
4. A visit booked online already has its time: the page shows it and never asks for another, and approving never moves it. Otherwise, if your shop allows slot picking, the customer's chosen time is booked on the schedule with capacity checked.
5. The customer gets a confirmation text and email, and their link becomes a live status tracker (Approved, Scheduled, In progress, Ready, Completed) that updates as you work. The text only says "You're booked for ..." when the time is really on your schedule. If the time could not be booked, the text says the customer asked for it and that you will confirm, the vehicle shows Requested on web and in the app, and you get a notification to book it.

On your side it is live too: with the vehicle page open, the quote card, the job statuses, and any quote preview you have open flip to Approved or Declined within a few seconds of the customer's tap, and the card notes when the customer first opened the link. No refresh needed.

The authorization record

Every recorded authorization keeps its evidence: an online approval, an approval you record in the shop (in person, by phone or by text), a re-authorization of a raise, and an invoice signature, online or on your screen. Each one stores who said yes, how, the exact time, the amount they agreed to, the device and network address it came from, and a PDF of the document exactly as it was approved, which never changes afterwards. When your approval terms were on the page, the record also keeps each term the customer ticked, word for word as it read that day. The record is kept per document in your shop's account, not on the customer's link, so it stays available after the link expires and after the bill is paid.

Where to find it: on the vehicle page, the bill column carries an Authorization row under the invoice's status (and under a sent estimate once any of it has been approved), for example Approved by Maria R. · texted link · Oct 21, 3:12 PM, with Signed by Maria R. and a small thumbnail of her drawn signature once the invoice is signed. In the invoice window the row reads Authorization record, directly under Signature and above Attachments, with a tick box at its left, the same box as the attachment rows (unticked by default; ticked sends the record PDF with the invoice email, prints the record's clean page after the bill on the customer's invoice page and in the shop's Invoice preview, and ends the invoice PDF with the same page; no copy carries links or network facts). Record payment does not show the row. On the phone it sits under the Quote and Invoice cards, and the invoice's send sheet carries the same tick as a Repair authorization row under the recipients. On the bill itself each approved job prints one plain line, Approved by Maria R. online · Oct 21, 2026, 3:12 PM, never a link.

Tap the row and the panel shows the record as one clean page, oldest first: for each authorization (estimate approvals, approvals recorded in the shop, re-authorizations of a raise, the invoice signature) the work it covered with the amount, one line of who, how (in person, online, by phone, by text) and when in your shop's time zone, and the drawn signature with the one sentence the customer signed under it. Any approval terms they ticked print under it as ticked boxes beside the sentences, in your wording as it was at the time, with the customer's name, how they approved and when, on the panel, the record PDF, the invoice's record pages and the approved estimate's print and PDF copies alike, so a printed copy is the authorization. An approval without a signature shows its one line of evidence instead, like Approved by text from (805) 910-0218. A revision of an approved job lists its one re-authorization (the raise the customer agreed to, in person, by phone or by text); the replacement estimate the revision writes is not a separate approval. Details under the list opens the facts a dispute may need: the network address of each authorization and View what they saw, the frozen PDF of the document as it was approved. Download record (PDF) (on the phone, Print or save the record) saves that same clean page; the details never print. It is the same PDF CarSignal Payments prepares for a card dispute, so what you hand a bank or a small-claims court is what the shop already has. The customer never sees this record.

The chosen time is checked again when approval lands. If another booking took the capacity first, CarSignal keeps the approval, leaves the work unscheduled, and asks for another time instead of force-booking the shop. A customer moving an existing appointment gets the same hours, lead-time, time-off, and bay checks; the original appointment link stays valid and the new time starts a fresh confirmation cycle.

Send to another person: on the Send quote sheet, add a phone or email for this send beside the Text and Email choices (up to five). Each one gets the same estimate and review link; the job's activity records who it went to. It is for this send only, so someone who should always get the paperwork belongs on the customer's contacts instead.

Changing work after approval

An approval holds to the amount the customer agreed to. Money roles can still add to an approved job: the line lands on the job and Revise approved work opens with it staged; the editor's own footer asks how the customer authorizes the increase before it lands on the bill: Record approval (they said yes in person, by phone or by text) or Send for re-authorization (their own page for the change, approved with a signature). Cancel the revision and the added line is removed. Whichever you pick is stamped on the job's history with the old and new amount, so the bill always matches what the customer authorized. Removing work or lowering the price needs no extra step, since the customer already agreed to more. This holds for every approval the same way, including one you record in the shop without sending anything: the amount on the job when you recorded it is the amount the customer agreed to.

The same rule protects a signed invoice: change it after it's signed and the signature clears, so the customer signs again for the new amount before paying.

Sent quotes are protected the same way, before approval: once a quote goes out, the jobs on it are locked. Changing one voids the quote first (the customer's link stops working), then you make the change and resend. The customer can never be looking at a price that's being edited underneath them. Part cost is the exception on both sent quotes and approved work: it is internal, so you can change it any time without voiding, revising or re-sending, and the price the customer saw does not move.

Mobile service visits

When the visit carries a service address, everything the customer reads follows it: the quote page asks when works for the shop to come to them, the live status page says "we'll come to you at your scheduled time," and the finished-work message says the car is all set instead of ready for pickup.