Automotive service and aftersales glossary

Aftersales is the European and UK name for everything a dealership does for a vehicle after it has been sold: servicing, mechanical repair, parts supply, warranty work and bodyshop repair. North American dealers call the identical department fixed operations, or fixed ops.

An amended repair order is an open repair order to which work, parts or price have been added or changed after the customer's original authorisation. The amendment keeps the original RO number, adds the new work as separate lines, and records the customer's approval for each added line before it is carried out.

An apprentice technician is a trainee employed and paid by a workshop while they train, working under supervision on progressively harder jobs until they qualify as a technician in their own right. In the UK that route is a formal three year apprenticeship. In the US it is more often a college programme.

Average repair order, shortened to ARO, is the average value invoiced per repair order over a period, calculated as total labour and parts sales on closed repair orders divided by the number of repair orders closed. It tells a service manager what each visit is worth and where the department is finding, presenting and selling work.

CSI stands for Customer Satisfaction Index: the score manufacturers use to rate dealership sales and service experiences. How it works and how to lift it.

Bay utilisation is the share of available bay hours in which a workshop bay is occupied by a vehicle having work actively performed on it. It measures the physical space as the constrained resource, calculated as productive bay hours divided by total available bay hours.

A comeback is a vehicle that returns to the workshop because the original repair did not fix the customer's concern, or because the work itself was wrong or incomplete. It is measured as comeback repair orders against total repair orders written in the same period.

A courtesy car is a replacement vehicle a garage, dealership or insurer provides to a customer while their own vehicle is off the road for repair. It is normally a small, standard-specification car offered for the duration of the work, not a like-for-like match for the customer's own vehicle.

Customer pay is the pay type on a dealership repair order for work the vehicle owner funds themselves, as opposed to work billed to the manufacturer under warranty or charged to another department internally. Dealers shorten it to CP, and it is the highest-margin of the three pay types.

Customer wait time is the time a customer spends on site at the dealership from arriving on the service drive to being handed back their keys. It is the waiting-room metric, measured only on waiter appointments, and it is the part of the service experience customers judge most directly.

Declined work is the recommended repair or maintenance a customer refuses to authorise at the point of the write-up. It is the same money as recommended work, viewed from the other side of the conversation, and it stays on the vehicle until someone else does the job or the part fails.

A delivery inspection is the condition check the receiving party carries out when an asset or consignment arrives, before signing for it. Signing without a reservation is not a formality. In carriage law it is treated as evidence that the goods arrived in the state described.

A workshop dispatcher is the person in a dealership service department who decides which technician gets which repair order, in what order, and when it is released to the ramp, matching each job to the skill level it needs and to the hours the workshop has left to sell. It is a shop floor role, not field dispatch.

DMS stands for Dealer Management System: the core software a dealership runs sales, F&I, parts, service and accounting on. What it does, with examples.

A drop off is a service appointment where the customer leaves the vehicle at the dealership and goes away, collecting it later, rather than waiting on site while the work is done. It is the opposite of a waiter appointment, and it is the booking type that gives a workshop room to plan its day.

Effective labour rate, shortened to ELR, is what a workshop actually earns per labour hour sold, calculated as total labour sales divided by total hours sold. It is a measured outcome rather than a price, and it sits below the posted door rate in almost every workshop that measures it.

An electronic vehicle health check, shortened to eVHC, is a technician's inspection of a vehicle in the workshop recorded on a tablet or phone against a fixed checklist. Each item is graded red, amber or green, backed by photos or video, and the report goes to the customer digitally with a way to approve the work.

Express service is a dedicated fast lane in a dealership workshop where routine maintenance is completed while the customer waits, inside a promised time that is usually around an hour. It runs on its own bays, its own technicians and a fixed list of jobs.

First visit resolution is the share of service visits that need no return trip, meaning the customer's concern is resolved and all authorised work is completed before the vehicle leaves. It is the dealership service equivalent of first-time fix rate, measured per visit rather than per job.

Fixed operations is the North American name for the side of a dealership that services and repairs vehicles instead of selling them: service, parts, and the body shop. It is called fixed because those departments carry fixed overhead and produce steady gross whether or not new cars are moving.

Flat rate is a pay system in which a technician is paid the published book time for a job rather than the hours actually spent on it, so the pay for a brake replacement is the same whether it takes 45 minutes or two hours. It rewards speed, and that is both its point and its main criticism.

A goodwill repair is work a manufacturer, importer or dealer pays for in whole or in part when no contract obliges them to pay anything. It is discretionary, usually offered to keep a customer, and it is what a service department turns to when a component fails just outside cover.

A handover inspection is the joint check carried out at the moment responsibility for an asset passes from one party to another, witnessed and signed by both. It is less a damage list than a timestamp on liability, which is why it is the record that surfaces in contract disputes.

Hours per repair order, shortened to HPRO, is the average number of labour hours sold on each repair order in a period, calculated as total sold hours divided by repair orders closed. It measures how much work each vehicle visit produces, not how fast the workshop gets through it.

Identified work is the additional repair or maintenance a technician finds during a vehicle health check or inspection that the customer has not yet authorised. It is tracked as a value and an hours figure and becomes sold work, deferred work or declined work once the customer decides.

Internal work is the pay type on a dealership repair order where the workshop performs labour and fits parts for the dealership itself, billed to another department rather than to a customer or the manufacturer. Reconditioning, pre-delivery inspection and lot damage are the classic examples.

A labour rate is the hourly price a workshop charges for technician time, applied to the hours a job is billed at rather than the hours it actually takes. Most workshops run several at once: a posted retail rate, a warranty rate, an internal rate and negotiated rates.

Menu pricing is the practice of setting one fixed, published price per maintenance job in advance, so the customer is quoted from the menu instead of from labour time multiplied by the labour rate plus parts, calculated on the day.

The MOT, short for Ministry of Transport test, is the annual roadworthiness and emissions test required for most vehicles used on UK roads. It checks that a vehicle meets minimum road safety and environmental standards on the day of the test, and it is not a service or a mechanical health check.

A multi point inspection (MPI) is the standard check a technician carries out on a vehicle's key systems at every service visit, working a fixed list of items and grading each one red, amber or green. It turns a booked job into a documented list of what the car needs now and what it needs soon.

Net promoter score (NPS) is a loyalty measure built on one question: how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague, scored 0 to 10. It is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, and it runs from minus 100 to plus 100.

Parts fill rate is the share of parts demands a dealership parts department satisfies immediately from its own shelf. NADA's parts guide puts first-time off-the-shelf fill rate at 90 percent and same-day fill rate at 95 percent, which are the two numbers most parts managers get measured on.

Parts markup is the amount a workshop adds to the cost price of a part to reach the price charged to the customer, expressed as a percentage of that cost. It drives the parts line of every repair order, and it is not the same number as gross margin.

PDI stands for Pre-Delivery Inspection: the check a dealer performs on a car before handover. What it covers, how long it takes, and what to ask for.

Pre paid maintenance is a plan sold at the point of vehicle sale that covers a defined set of scheduled services for a fixed term or mileage, paid up front and redeemed at the dealership over time. It is booked as a liability at the sale, not as income, and earned as each service is performed.

A RAG report is the customer-facing output of a vehicle health check in which every inspected item is graded red for work needed now, amber for work needed soon, or green for checked and in order. The name stands for red, amber, green, the traffic-light convention used across project management and fleet compliance.

Recommended work is the list of repair and maintenance items a technician identifies during an inspection and puts to the customer for authorisation. It covers everything beyond the job that was booked, priced as separate lines on the repair order, and it is the number declined work gets measured against.

Repair approval is the customer's authorisation, given in writing, by phone or through a digital link, for a workshop to carry out specified chargeable work on their vehicle at a stated price. It is recorded against the repair order before the work starts and covers both the booked job and any work identified during inspection.

Repair order count is the number of repair orders a workshop opens or closes in a defined period, and it is the denominator underneath almost every other fixed operations metric. It measures visits, not revenue, and the two move independently more often than managers expect.

A roadworthiness inspection is the periodic legal check that a vehicle already in use still meets the safety and environmental standards its country sets. It covers brakes, steering, tyres, lights, suspension, structure and emissions, and ends in a recorded pass or fail.

RO stands for Repair Order: the document a service department opens for every job. What an RO number is, what the RO contains, and how RO fees work.

Service absorption is the share of a dealership's adjusted overhead covered by the gross profit of the fixed departments alone, service, parts and body shop. It answers one question for a dealer principal: if the showroom sold nothing this month, how much of the building would still be paid for?

A service advisor is the link between customer and workshop: takes the car in, writes the repair order, gets approvals, hands back. Duties, skills, typical day.

Service advisor training is the structured coaching that teaches dealership service advisors how to run a write-up, present inspection findings, explain recommended work in language a customer accepts, and follow up on the jobs that get declined. It is the main lever on approval rates.

Service capacity is the number of productive labour hours a dealership workshop can actually sell in a given period, calculated from the technicians on strength and the hours each realistically clocks onto jobs. It is measured in hours, never in bays, ramps or bookings.

The service drive is the covered lane where customers hand their vehicles over at a dealership, and the point in the aftersales process where an advisor greets the car, writes the repair order and agrees what will be looked at. Everything the workshop earns that day is decided there.

The service lane is the covered drive-in area of a dealership where customers arrive for service, meet the advisor and have the vehicle walked around, checked in and written up before it goes to the workshop. The name is also used for the software that runs that check-in process.

A service loaner is a vehicle a dealership lends a customer at no charge while their own car is in the workshop, drawn from a fleet the dealership owns or leases for that purpose. It is a capacity asset carrying a daily cost, not a courtesy gesture.

A service menu is the fixed list of maintenance jobs a dealership sells, with each job defined in advance by its operation content, labour time and price. It lets the advisor present a set choice at the write-up instead of building a quote from scratch on every car.

A service reminder is a scheduled message prompting a vehicle owner to book work that is due: a routine service, an annual test, an outstanding recall, or a repair they turned down at an earlier visit. It is the main tool a workshop has for filling its own diary rather than waiting for the phone.

Service retention is the share of a dealership's customers who come back to that dealership for service inside a defined window, usually measured against vehicles it sold. It is the metric most sensitive to definition, because the window and the denominator can move the same store's result by twenty points.

A shop foreman is the senior technician who runs the workshop floor: the person junior technicians call when a diagnosis stalls, who checks quality before a car leaves, and who decides whether a job needs to move to someone else. It is a technical leadership role, not a departmental management one.

Sold hours are the labour hours a workshop invoices, whether to a retail customer, a manufacturer under warranty or an internal department. They are the book or menu time for the job, not the time the technician actually took, and they are the numerator in most workshop performance ratios.

Technician efficiency is the labour hours a technician sells divided by the hours that technician actually clocks onto jobs, shown as a percentage, and it measures one thing only: how fast the work gets done against the published flat-rate time. It routinely runs above 100%, and it should.

Technician levels are the graded ladder a workshop uses to classify its technicians by proven skill, from apprentice through to master technician, with the grade deciding which jobs a technician is allocated and what they are paid. The frameworks behind the grades differ by country.

Upsell rate is the percentage of recommended additional work that a service department gets approved by the customer, measured either as approved items against every item recommended, or as the share of repair orders carrying at least one extra. The two methods give different answers from the same month.

VHC stands for Vehicle Health Check: the inspection a workshop does during a service, reported as red, amber or green. What is checked and why it matters.

Video inspection is the practice of judging the condition of an object, vehicle, property or space by recording it on video and reviewing that footage, either live as it is captured or afterwards. The term covers two unrelated fields: camera surveys of pipes and ducts, and phone based inspection of assets.

A video quote is a quotation for repair or maintenance work delivered to the customer as a short video, in which the technician or advisor shows the worn part or the fault on the customer's own vehicle, states the price, and gives the customer a way to approve the work from the same message.

A waiter appointment is a service booking where the customer stays at the dealership while the work is carried out and leaves with the vehicle the same visit, usually inside one to two hours. The alternative is a drop-off, where the customer leaves the vehicle for the day.

A warranty audit is a manufacturer's review of warranty claims a dealer has already been paid for, checking each file against the published policy and reclaiming money on any claim the file cannot support. The repair is rarely what fails. The documentation behind it usually is.

A warranty claim is a request for payment a repairer submits to a manufacturer or warranty provider for work performed under an existing contract, arguing a named component failed inside the agreed term and conditions. It is contractual, so approval turns on cover, cause and evidence.

Workshop loading is the share of a dealership's available technician hours that is already booked with confirmed work for a future day, shown as a percentage. Service managers read it to see whether next week's diary is full, thin, or oversold before the week starts.

Workshop utilisation is the share of the time a workshop pays for that is actually spent working on vehicles, measured as productive hours divided by attended hours. It is the first of the three workshop time ratios and the one that says how busy the department is, not how good it is.