For Auto Mechanics: Fleet, Insurance, and Walk-Ins on One Invoice Stack

2026-05-25

A garage isn’t really one business — it’s three. The walk-in who pays cash for a brake job. The taxi or delivery fleet that drops off four vans on Monday and expects an itemised invoice with a 30-day term. The insurance claim where every part number, labour hour, and VAT line will be scrutinised by a third party who has never met you.

Three businesses, three billing rhythms, one set of invoices that has to hold up under audit.

Meet Lukas

Lukas owns a small garage on the edge of Kaunas. Two lifts, three mechanics, and a steady mix: maybe 60% private cars, 25% a small delivery fleet that’s been with him for years, and 15% insurance work that comes through two local brokers. The fleet pays at the end of the month. The insurance jobs pay when the broker approves the documentation — usually six to eight weeks later. The walk-ins pay before they drive out.

His old system was a notepad on the desk and an Excel file his accountant rebuilt every quarter. It worked at two cars a day. At eight it started leaking — a missing receipt for a clutch kit, an insurance invoice rejected because the labour hours weren’t broken out per task, a fleet customer who paid the wrong amount because last month’s invoice had been overwritten.

The Real Billing Reality

Every job has the same shape — parts plus labour — but the paperwork around it changes per customer type:

Walk-ins want a simple invoice, often emailed for warranty purposes. Speed matters more than detail.
Fleet clients want consolidated, itemised, net-30 invoices with their PO reference, vehicle plate, and labour-hours broken out per task. Some want one invoice per vehicle; some want one combined invoice per month.
Insurance claims want every part with its catalogue number, labour at the agreed hourly rate, and a clean VAT breakdown. Anything missing and the claim bounces.

On top of all that, parts come from three suppliers, prices change, and the margin between what you pay and what you bill is the whole game.

How Haiku Fits a Garage

Three pieces of Haiku map cleanly onto a mechanic’s day:

One invoice per job with parts and labour as separate lines, written in under a minute. Customer details (fleet account, insurance broker, walk-in) save automatically and reuse next time. How to create an invoice.
Net-30 or longer payment terms built into the invoice, with the due date printed on the document and overdue invoices flagged automatically — no spreadsheet of who-owes-what. Due dates and payment terms.
Supplier invoices logged as expenses — upload the PDF or e-invoice for the clutch kit and Haiku extracts the supplier and amount. Three months later, when an insurance claim queries the part cost, both the supplier invoice and your invoice to the customer are one search away. Expense tracking.

Same flow whether the garage does general repairs, body work, tyres, or specialist diagnostics. Same flow whether the customer is a pensioner with a 15-year-old hatchback or a logistics company with 40 vans.

When It’s Not the Right Fit

If the garage is part of a dealership chain with its own DMS already issuing invoices, Haiku won’t replace that. If you do fewer than 5 jobs a week and only take cash, a notebook is still simpler. Everywhere in between — independent garages doing 20 to several hundred jobs a month across walk-ins, fleet, and insurance — this is the difference between a clean Friday afternoon and a messy Sunday night chasing receipts.

Getting Started in 3 Steps

Sign up free at haiku.lt — the free plan covers 500 invoices a year, enough for most small garages.
Create one invoice per customer type to see how each looks: a quick walk-in, a fleet invoice with net-30, an insurance job with parts catalogue numbers in the line descriptions. The three templates that result will cover 90% of your week.
Upload the next supplier invoice PDF to the Expenses page. The part numbers become searchable — so the next time an insurance broker queries a markup, the cost side is two clicks away.

Reclaim Your Friday Afternoons

Questions? Email dalius.dobravolskas@gmail.com.