Recommended work
Recommended work explained: what it means on a repair order
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, it is priced as separate lines on the repair order, and nothing on it happens until the customer says yes.
Depending on where you work, the same thing is called recommended work, recommended services, additional work required, or just "the red and amber items" from the vehicle health check. Same list.
How does recommended work get generated?
It comes out of an inspection, not out of a sales conversation, and that distinction is the whole ballgame. The usual sequence:
- The vehicle is inspected against a fixed checklist, either during the booked job or as a standalone health check.
- Each item is graded, most commonly on a traffic-light scale. Red means needed now on safety or legality grounds. Amber means it will need doing, with a rough horizon. Green means fine.
- Red and amber items are priced in parts and labour by the advisor or the parts desk.
- The list is presented to the customer, who authorises some, all or none of it.
Everything the customer says no to becomes declined work. That is the relationship worth holding onto: recommended and declined are the same money counted at two different moments, one before the customer answers and one after.
How is recommended work measured?
Three figures do most of the work, and they should be read together rather than one at a time.
- Recommended value per repair order. Total recommended value divided by repair orders written. A low number usually means inspections are being skipped or rushed, not that the cars are healthy.
- Conversion or approval rate. Approved value divided by recommended value. This is the one that tells you how well the workshop explains itself.
- Sold hours per repair order. The output figure the workshop actually gets paid on.
Push the first number without watching the second and you have simply created a bigger declined file. Push the second by recommending less, and you have hidden a problem rather than fixed one.
Recommended work explained: a worked example
A workshop writes 620 repair orders in a month and recommends 148,000 in additional parts and labour, so 239 per repair order. Customers approve 54,000 of it, a conversion rate of 36 percent. The remaining 94,000 is the declined file. Lift conversion by six points without touching the recommended figure and roughly 8,900 more comes through the door on the same inspections and the same technicians.
Where recommended work leaks
Recommended lines fail to convert for reasons that have very little to do with whether the work is needed.
The most common one is simple: the customer cannot see what is being described. A worn pad or a perished bush is obvious to the person holding it and invisible to the person being phoned about it. That is not scepticism about the technician. It is a person being asked to approve a few hundred in currency on a description of something they have never looked at.
Timing is the second leak. Customers are at work when the call comes, they want to talk to somebody at home first, and the vehicle is due out at five. The third is trust in the venue rather than in the recommendation. In the Cox Automotive 2025 Service Industry Study of 1,974 US vehicle owners, dealerships took 29 percent of service visits in 2025, down from 33 percent in 2018, with general repair shops now the most preferred provider on cost and location. The recommendation may well be accepted. Just not by you.
Worth knowing where the ceiling sits, too. The same study puts the repair cost at which owners start weighing a trade-in against the repair at 3,195 US dollars. Above that, a large recommended list stops being a service conversation and turns into a replacement conversation.
How recommended work differs from related terms
- Upsell. An upsell starts from what you want to sell. Recommended work starts from what the vehicle needs. Customers can tell the difference quickly, and they say so on surveys.
- Warranty work. Warranty and recall items are authorised by the manufacturer, not the customer. They belong on the same document and in a different conversation.
- MOT advisories. An advisory recorded on a passing MOT is a statutory observation about a specific test. Your amber list is a commercial recommendation. They frequently describe the same worn component and they are not interchangeable records.
- Deferred work. Deferred implies an agreed date to return. Most declined lines have no date at all, which is why they need a service reminder attached.
Making recommended work easier to say yes to
Four practical things move conversion without changing what gets inspected:
- Separate needed now from needed soon in the pricing, so the customer can approve a part of the list without feeling they refused the rest.
- Give every amber item a horizon. "Around 5,000 miles" is a booking. "Soon" is a decline.
- Send the evidence with the price. A photo of the actual component, with the measurement on it, does more than a paragraph of explanation.
- Sort the mobility question first. If a courtesy car is available for the return visit, say so while the customer is still deciding.
The evidence part is where guided capture is useful, and it is what Venta Capture, a product of VentaVid, was built for: the organisation decides what gets recorded and in what order, so the images that reach the customer show the specific thing being talked about rather than a general shot of a wheel arch. The judgement stays where it was. It just arrives with something to look at.
