Every vehicle's history lived on a spreadsheet tab
Rene's Autoservice in Breukelen tracked every customer's maintenance in a workbook: one tab per registration plate. Alongside it sat a website that knew nothing about any of it. Since August 2026 it is one system.
How it used to go
The workbook was a spreadsheet with a tab per plate. It held the services, the odometer readings and the notes, kept up for years. It worked — as long as the person keeping it was around.
Anyone wanting to know when a car was last in looked up the tab. A customer calling about their MOT got an answer after someone had checked. The website sat beside all of it and knew none of it: no vehicle file, no appointment, no invoice.
The question was not „build a nicer website”. The question was whether the workshop and the website could know the same things.
- A workbook with one tab per registration plate
- A website disconnected from the workshop
- Invoices handled outside the system
- No way for a customer to see their own history
- MOT reminders someone had to track by hand
Seven things, one system
Everything runs in the same application on the same data. What gets entered in the workshop appears in the vehicle file, on the invoice and in the customer's portal — without anyone retyping it.
- 1A file per vehicle
Plate, make, model and MOT expiry come straight from the Dutch national vehicle register's open data. Below that sits the timeline: services, odometer readings and notes, in order.
- 2Customer portal
The customer logs in and sees their own vehicles, the history and their documents. A new customer registers themselves and lands correctly in the administration in the process.
- 3Booking without an account
Nobody creates an account to book an MOT. Plate, name and phone number are enough. The plate is looked up live in the register, so the visitor can see they have the right vehicle.
- 4Workshop calendar
The week as a time grid, with the appointments in it. Usable on a phone, because that is the device within reach in a workshop.
- 5Invoicing
Draw up, send, mark paid and find back. The lines fill themselves from the prices in the system, including the purchase price per line.
- 6Reminders that send themselves
Every morning at seven the system checks which MOTs and services are coming up. That looking-up used to be done by hand in the workbook; now the list is simply there. The message to the customer goes out automatically, for everyone whose email address is known — the old workbook held none, so those are filled in as customers come by.
- 7The public site
Workshop, tuning, prices and contact, with the company details in one place so they cannot drift apart. Including the analytics and the search visibility.
The old history came across
A new system that starts empty is not a new system, it is a second system. So the workbook was read in and migrated — and that was the bulk of the whole job.
The columns were not in the same order everywhere and the header row was not at the same height. On some sheets the date and odometer columns swapped places halfway down. Twelve tabs also carried the history of more than one vehicle: the customer got a different car and the writing simply continued on the same sheet.
Those cases were not guessed. Make and model were checked against the national register, and whatever could not be assigned to a vehicle with certainty was not thrown away but kept as a note. What could not be traced at all is on a list of questions — because a system that guesses is worse than a notebook that is right.
The import is repeatable: the same line never goes in twice. That sounds obvious and is not — it is the difference between daring to migrate once and being able to do it calmly a few times.
- One program on one server, with SQLite as the database
- No third-party components with a subscription attached
- A backup every night, the last fourteen kept
- The data sits on the company's own server
- Vehicle data from the national register's open data
The same principles as any job: your environment, your licences, your data. How that is set up →
What it does
Beforehand the owner put the manual work at around six and a half hours a week: twenty minutes a day updating the workbook, five hours a week looking things up and sending invoices, and a few minutes a month checking MOT dates.
Now it costs him, by his own account, five minutes a day, all of it together. That is a difference of about six hours a week — some 318 hours a year, or forty working days of eight hours. At €39 per hour worked that is over €12,000 in capacity coming back into the workshop.
The looking-up has gone, because it is in the vehicle file: what gets entered in the workshop appears straight away on the invoice and in the customer's portal. A customer who calls gets an answer while still on the line, and can look it up themselves as well. What remains is checking and sending — that stays human work, and those are the five minutes.
Both figures are the owner's own: nothing was counted beforehand, and this is a look back afterwards. Calculated on 230 working days a year and €39 per hour worked — both on the conservative side. The workshop is open six days a week, and €39 is the Dutch national average for trade while we use €44 for technical work elsewhere on this site. In practice it is therefore higher. On jobs that start as an automation question we measure before anything is built, and then the return is in black and white rather than in an estimate. How that works →
- Sector · car workshop and tuning
- Location · Breukelen, Netherlands
- Live since · August 2026
- Built · public site, customer portal, workshop administration, invoicing, reminders
- Migrated · the complete maintenance history from the old workbook
- Saves · 318 hours a year — forty working days, over €12,000 in capacity
Ik had een website die los stond van de werkplaats, en een werkboek waar alles in stond. Het idee
was eerst alleen een nieuwe site, maar het werd het hele systeem: de auto's, de afspraken, de
facturen en het klantportaal.
Wat me beviel: ik sprak steeds dezelfde persoon, en als iets niet duidelijk was werd het gevraagd
in plaats van ingevuld. Er staat nu niets in het systeem waarvan ik niet weet waar het vandaan
komt.
The quote is left in the original Dutch on purpose. Rene approved those words; a translated version would be a statement he never made. Our rendering, for readers who do not read Dutch: „I had a website that stood apart from the workshop, and a workbook with everything in it. The idea was only a new site at first, but it became the whole system: the vehicles, the appointments, the invoices and the customer portal. What I liked: I spoke to the same person throughout, and when something was unclear it got asked rather than filled in. There is nothing in the system now that I do not know the origin of.”
Start with one process
Tell us which work gets retyped most often at your company. If automating it turns out to be a bad idea, you will hear that in the first conversation — before there is an invoice.
The first conversation is free and without obligation. Want it substantiated? The Automation Check is €295 — deducted if you have us build within 30 days.