An online booking system for mechanics

Your GoFolio booking page is a link customers can open on any phone, with no login. It takes them through four steps and drops the job into your bookings list with the vehicle, the address and what’s wrong already filled in. Here is exactly what the customer sees and what you can switch on or off.

The four steps the customer goes through

1. Service. Cards for each service you offer, such as Annual Service or Pre-Purchase Inspection.
2. Day. A calendar where closed and full days are greyed out. The page says you’ll call to confirm the exact time.
3. Details. Name and contact, make, model, year, rego, odometer, the job address with Google address lookup, plus any extra questions you’ve added to that service.
4. Confirm. A summary, then the booking is sent. The customer gets a confirmation email and, in Australia, a text.

You get an email and a text alert for every new booking. You can turn the alerts off in settings.

Setting it up per service

Extra questions

Each service can ask its own questions. Field types are short text, phone, email, long text, number, a dropdown and an address. You can also make “describe the job” compulsory on a service, so a “Diagnose a fault” booking never arrives blank.

Notice period

Set how many days’ notice a service needs. A timing belt job that needs parts ordered can start two days out while a battery swap stays bookable for tomorrow.

Urgent same-day option

On a service, you can offer an urgent same-day booking for an extra fee that you set. Urgent bookings send you a separate urgent alert by email and text.

Quote first

For jobs you can’t price sight unseen, mark the service as quote-first. The booking lands as “Quote requested” and you send a price for the customer to accept online. See quote software for mechanics for that flow.

Worked example: a pre-purchase inspection service

A buyer books the inspection, but the car is at the seller’s place. This is how that service could be set up, and the link you’d paste into a Facebook reply or Marketplace message. Swap in your own shop name.

The ?service= link skips the service step, and an old service link keeps working if the link name changes later. The ?embed=true version drops into an iframe on your existing site and resizes to fit. We set the embed up with you or your web person, and the form shows your logo and business name.

Why customers pick a day, not a time slot

Most booking systems sell time slots. That works for a haircut. For a mechanic, a slot is a promise you often can’t keep: a seized exhaust stud, a part that turns out to be wrong, or a 40-minute drive between suburbs moves everything after it. So GoFolio asks the customer for a day, and you ring to agree a time. Until you set it, the booking shows “Time TBD”.

Your booking page also knows how many jobs you take in a day. A full day greys out, a cancelled job frees its spot again, and you can still squeeze one in yourself from New Booking.

Prefer to set every date yourself? Turn off “Customers pick a date”. Bookings then arrive with no date and sit under “Needs a date”. When you set one, with an approximate time, you can text or email the customer about it in the same step.