PitDesk Auto Repair CRM – Work Orders & Service History

Description

PitDesk Auto Repair CRM is a lightweight customer relationship management (CRM) plugin for auto repair shops, garages, and independent mechanics who run their business on WordPress. It turns incoming visit requests into tracked jobs and keeps a full customer and vehicle service history, without the cost or complexity of heavyweight shop-management software.

Customers submit a visit request from a form on your site; your team runs everything else from the WordPress dashboard. PitDesk is self-hosted, fully free forever, and works without WooCommerce.

What you can do

• Capture leads: a builder-friendly visit-request form turns website visitors into leads, with built-in spam protection.
• Manage customers: a searchable customer database with contact details.
• Track vehicles: make, model, year, VIN, license plate, mileage, and more, each linked to a customer.
• Run work orders: move each job through a fixed status workflow, from estimate to closed, with labor and parts line items, tax, and totals.
• Keep service history: every vehicle keeps a complete, per-vehicle service history you can revisit any time.
• See the shop at a glance: a live dashboard shows open work orders by status, new leads, and customer and vehicle counts.
• Control access: built-in roles for shop owner or manager, front desk, and mechanic.

Who it is for

Independent auto repair shops, mechanic shops, garages, mobile mechanics, and automotive service businesses that want a simple, self-hosted CRM and work-order tracker inside WordPress, instead of an expensive subscription to shop-management software.

Embed the visit form anywhere

The public visit form adopts your theme or page-builder styling and can be added with a shortcode, the block editor, an Elementor widget, or a Divi module. Staff never work from the front end; all shop work happens in wp-admin.

Built for WordPress

• Self-hosted on your own site; your customer and vehicle data stays in your database.
• No monthly subscription, and no WooCommerce required.
• Translation-ready, and ships with Spanish (Mexico), French (Canada), and Ukrainian.

Usage

Place the visit form on a public page using whichever tool your site is built with:

• Shortcode: add [wrenchpress_visit_form] to any page, post, or builder text area.
• Block editor: add the “Visit request form” block.
• Elementor: add the “PitDesk Visit Form” widget.
• Divi: add the “PitDesk Visit Form” module.

The day-to-day flow:

1. A customer submits the visit form. It arrives under Leads.
2. Promote the lead to a customer, then add their vehicle.
3. Create a work order and move it through the statuses as the job progresses.
4. Add line items and notes. The vehicle keeps a complete service history you can revisit any time.

Accessibility

PitDesk targets WCAG 2.2 Level AA and follows the WordPress accessibility coding standards. This section describes what that means in practice, what is checked, and which parts are yours rather than the plugin’s.

How it is checked

• Automated: every plugin admin screen, the public visit form, and every dialog is scanned with axe-core on each change, including while a dialog is open.
• Automated tools are not enough on their own, and this plugin does not pretend otherwise. There is no automated rule for keyboard operation, visible focus, focus being covered up, meaning carried by color alone, or status messages being announced. A clean automated run is a floor, not a conformance claim.
• Browser tests: every dialog is opened and operated from the keyboard in a real browser, and the tests confirm that focus moves into the dialog, cannot leave it while it is open, and returns to the control that opened it. Appointments can be created and rescheduled from the keyboard alone, and that path is tested by keystroke, not by simulated clicks.
• Manual: keyboard-only operation of every screen, plus a screen-reader pass using Orca on Linux, are part of the release checklist for accessibility changes. Orca is named because it is the screen reader actually used on this project. No other screen reader is tested, and coverage with any other screen reader is not claimed.

The public visit form inherits your theme

The visit form deliberately takes its colors and typography from your theme or page builder, so that it looks like the rest of your site rather than like a foreign widget. The consequence is honest and worth stating plainly: the contrast between the text and the background on that form comes from your theme, so meeting AA contrast on the front end is the site owner’s responsibility.

What the plugin does guarantee, no matter what your theme does to it, is a visible focus indicator on every control in the form. A keyboard user can always see where they are. Field boundaries are drawn in your own text color, so they stay visible against your background.

The wp-admin screens are ours

The contrast of the plugin’s own admin screens, including every status badge, the reminder worklist, and the appointments calendar, is the plugin’s responsibility, and it meets WCAG 2.2 AA. No state is signaled by color alone: overdue reminders, cancelled appointments, and completed steps all carry text or a text alternative as well.

Known issue in WordPress itself

On WordPress 7.0, core’s own secondary buttons render below AA contrast under five of the nine admin color schemes, including the default “Fresh” scheme. The most visible example is the Search button that WordPress adds to every list table, which measures about 4.0:1 against its background where 4.5:1 is required. This is core’s own chrome and core’s own styling. It appears identically on core screens such as Users and Plugins with no plugin involved, and PitDesk cannot correct it without restyling WordPress itself, which it will not do.

If it affects you, selecting the Modern, Blue, Coffee, or Ectoplasm admin color scheme on your WordPress user profile raises those buttons above 4.5:1.

External services

This plugin can optionally use a third-party CAPTCHA service to protect the public visit form from spam and automated abuse. A CAPTCHA is only loaded when a shop administrator selects a provider and enters its keys on the plugin settings screen. No CAPTCHA service is contacted until you enable one. You choose one of the following:

Google reCAPTCHA v3

Used to score visit-form submissions so bots can be rejected. When enabled, the reCAPTCHA script is loaded from google.com on any page that shows the visit form, and on submission the plugin sends the reCAPTCHA token, your site key, and the visitor’s IP address to Google’s verification endpoint (https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/siteverify) to obtain a score. Data is sent only when the form is shown or submitted.
Terms: https://policies.google.com/terms
Privacy: https://policies.google.com/privacy
reCAPTCHA terms: https://developers.google.com/recaptcha

Cloudflare Turnstile

An alternative CAPTCHA used for the same purpose. When enabled, the Turnstile widget is loaded from challenges.cloudflare.com on any page that shows the visit form, and on submission the plugin sends the Turnstile token, your site key, and the visitor’s IP address to Cloudflare’s verification endpoint (https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/siteverify). Data is sent only when the form is shown or submitted.
Terms: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-terms/
Privacy: https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/
Turnstile: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/turnstile/