Priced the way Auto Body & Paint work is billed
A bumper scuff repair — sand, prime & color-blend and a rock chip touch-up — brush & pen session don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Auto Body & Paint the way the work is really billed: flat per repair, SMART-style (bumper scuff $375 · deep scratch $450 · wheel $150 each), plus one flat paint-and-materials line per spray job. Tap the work, put in the numbers, and the line prices itself — no napkin math, no undercharging a job because you rushed the quote.
What Auto Body & Paint jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Auto Body & Paint work — researched to be realistic, so you can send an estimate that isn't a guess. Adjust any of them to your market in a tap.
Typical starting prices in the app — your area, your materials, and your reputation move them. You set your own; these just keep you from undercharging on the first quote.
Deep scratch repair — fill, prime, color match & blend, priced out
Numbers only mean something on a real job, so here's how SideWRK builds the ticket on a common one:
SideWRK puts the parts on at what you actually paid — so the $382 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Auto Body & Paint price
Two Auto Body & Paint jobs that look the same on paper can be a hundred dollars apart once you're on site. Here's what actually changes the number — the things to size up before you quote:
- Depth decides the job — a clear-coat scratch polishes out for $125, a scratch through the color coat is a $450 fill-prime-blend, and primer-deep damage past a panel is booth work you refer out.
- The paint itself — metallics, tri-coat pearls, and aged or faded paint all make the blend harder, and the color-match disclosure belongs on the estimate before you spray, not after.
- What you can legally do on-site — brush, pen, aerosol, and small-cup work is open to any mobile operator; spray-gun refinishing needs a filtered enclosure and HVLP, and many cities restrict it at residences entirely.
What a Auto Body & Paint job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Auto Body & Paint is no exception. SideWRK captures year/make/model and the paint code off the door-jamb sticker — the color match starts there, not at the paint store and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- year/make/model and the paint code off the door-jamb sticker — the color match starts there, not at the paint store
- damage depth — clear coat, base coat, or primer-deep — because it decides polish vs. respray vs. refer-out
- time-stamped pre-work photos of the damage and any prior bodywork
- the color-match disclosure on blended repairs over aged or faded paint
- the booth-referral note when damage runs past localized spot repair
Example note on a job: "SMART spot repair — damaged area refinished and blended only; color match on this aged paint is approximate."
How to price a Auto Body & Paint job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Auto Body & Paint job and tap a suggestion like "Bumper scuff repair — sand, prime & color-blend" or "Deep scratch repair — fill, prime, color match & blend" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it flat per repair
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, flat per repair, SMART-style (bumper scuff $375 · deep scratch $450 · wheel $150 each), plus one flat paint-and-materials line per spray job. Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Auto Body & Paint ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "SMART spot repair — damaged area refinished and blended only; color match on this aged paint is approximate." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Auto Body & Paint-specific records: year/make/model and the paint code off the door-jamb sticker — the color match starts there, not at the paint store, and damage depth — clear coat, base coat, or primer-deep — because it decides polish vs. respray vs. refer-out.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Auto Body & Paint estimate for approval. Your customer approves from their phone, the invoice goes out, and you get paid — card or Apple Pay, on the spot.
Staying on the right side of the rules
SideWRK documents your Auto Body & Paint work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: body and paint work for pay is regulated auto repair in several states — California requires BAR (ARD) registration and a written, authorized estimate before work starts — and spray-gun refinishing is federally legal only inside a filtered enclosure with HVLP equipment (EPA 6H); brush, pen, aerosol, and small-cup touch-up work sits outside the spray rule.
Auto Body & Paint pricing — common questions
How do I price a Auto Body & Paint job in SideWRK?
You bill flat per repair, SMART-style (bumper scuff $375 · deep scratch $450 · wheel $150 each), plus one flat paint-and-materials line per spray job. Add the work — Bumper scuff repair — sand, prime & color-blend, Deep scratch repair — fill, prime, color match & blend, Clear-coat scratch polish — wet-sand & buff — enter the numbers, and each line prices itself. Parts go on at your cost, so you see real profit and not just the total.
What does a typical Auto Body & Paint job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like deep scratch repair — fill, prime, color match & blend runs about $450 in the app — roughly $382 of that is your labor and about $68 is parts at your cost. Common Auto Body & Paint work ranges from about $90 to $450. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Auto Body & Paint job?
The records Auto Body & Paint work actually needs: year/make/model and the paint code off the door-jamb sticker — the color match starts there, not at the paint store; damage depth — clear coat, base coat, or primer-deep — because it decides polish vs. respray vs. refer-out; time-stamped pre-work photos of the damage and any prior bodywork. They stay on the job as you work, so the paper trail is built instead of reconstructed later, and the disclosures this trade needs print on the estimate and invoice themselves.
Do I need a license to do Auto Body & Paint work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: body and paint work for pay is regulated auto repair in several states — California requires BAR (ARD) registration and a written, authorized estimate before work starts — and spray-gun refinishing is federally legal only inside a filtered enclosure with HVLP equipment (EPA 6H); brush, pen, aerosol, and small-cup touch-up work sits outside the spray rule. SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Auto Body & Paint?
Yes — it runs all 42 trades, each priced and documented its own way. Every trade is included, and you switch between them in a tap.
Your first jobs
Pricing is the easy half. On this trade you quoted a car off a photograph somebody texted you, and the car gets a say once you're standing next to it — so nearly everything that protects the number happens before any sandpaper comes out.
- The estimate is the piece of paper, not a formality. Your customer opens it on their phone, types their name, taps approve. The typed name prints on the document as the signature with the date beside it, and a push lands on your phone the second they tap. Several states treat body and paint work for pay as regulated auto repair, and where they do, that approval is the written authorization the notice at the bottom of the same document is talking about. A text saying "yeah, about four hundred" is not.
- When the total climbs past what they said yes to, the job says so. Add a line after the approval and the moment the running total passes the authorized number an amber banner appears on the job — this total is more than the amount the customer authorized, get additional authorization before the extra work — with a Log authorization button right there for a yes given at the car, or you re-send the estimate. Every response lands as its own dated row on the job with the amount it was given at. That's the mechanic. What to actually say when the bumper comes off and there's a cracked bracket behind it — and what the common finds cost — is the whole of flagging hidden damage first, which works one supplement from phone quote to approved total.
- Start the record before you start the price. Year, make and model. A paint code box that tells you where the sticker is, on the door jamb or the B-pillar. A panel dropdown that already knows what panels are called — front bumper, rear bumper, door, fender, hood, quarter panel, wheels, headlights, or multiple. The VIN if you want it. And a notes box that prompts for the two things that actually decide the job: damage size and depth, and whether the paint is aged, faded, or has been worked before.
- Set a floor, because $90 jobs exist on this menu. Shop holds a separate minimum charge for each trade you run. A ticket that lands under yours gets flagged, and one tap puts a "Shop minimum" line on to lift it. Headlight restoration is honest work and it is also ninety dollars — worth doing on a car you're already parked beside, worth turning down thirty minutes across town. The flag shows up while turning it down is still an option.
- Deposits are a dropdown, so stop negotiating them. Five options sit on the estimate — waived, or 10, 25, 33, 50 percent — and Shop carries a default you set once, so the answer is already filled in when you open the job. An hour's blend on a bumper rarely needs anything up front. A car you've blocked a whole morning out for, or a color you'd have to go and buy before you start, is a fair place to ask.
Repeat business
Nobody books their next scratch in advance. Auto body is one of the trades the app deliberately gives no recurring plan — fifteen of the forty-two have one, this isn't among them — so there's no cadence here to sell. The repeat money sits with whoever is already holding twenty sets of keys.
- The customer worth having owns twenty cars, not one. A used-car lot turning trade-ins around before they hit the front row. A detailer prepping a car for sale who keeps finding scuffs. A fleet yard with a line of white vans that keep meeting the same concrete post. The app is built that way round: vehicles hang off the customer, so the lot is one entry in your book and every car under it is its own record with its own paint code, panel and history. Customers are unlimited, and a lot with twenty cars in it is one of them.
- "Do this again" is this trade's repeat mechanic. Open a job you've closed out — done, paid, or even one you marked lost — and a single button starts a new estimate against that same customer and that same car, carrying every line over at the figure you charged last time. Negative credit rows stay behind, and so do the photos and the money already collected. Rebuild a quote for the fourth silver sedan off that lot from scratch and you'll price it a bit differently every time. Copy it and you won't.
- Agree a price once, then stop retyping it. A line you add to a job goes into your price book with one checkbox on the way in, and saving the same name again just updates what it's worth. When a lot manager agrees a number for scuffs and a number for wheels, those become one-tap lines. It's a small thing on job one and the whole job on job forty.
- What a lot actually wants from you is a document. A dealer reconditioning a trade-in has to account for what was done to the car, and most mobile guys hand over a total scrawled on a business card. Your invoice carries the vehicle, the itemized repairs, a sequential invoice number, your registration number in the header if you typed one into Shop, and this trade's notices at the bottom. It files. That, more than a discount, is what gets you the next twenty.
- Two trades, one row of cars. All 42 trades are on and swap in a tap, over one shared book of customers. It earns its keep here because the row of trade-ins you're quoting scuffs on has dings in it too: walk the row once as the dent guy and once as the paint guy and that's one drive, two tickets. Detailing is the one that gets asked back to the same lot every week.
How auto body work bills
Flat, per repair. The panel doesn't set the price and neither does the clock. Add work on this trade and eight buttons are waiting; one tap fills the line in, and every figure on it stays yours to overwrite. The billing model is sitting right there in the form labels — quantity is plain Qty, the money box reads Price each ($), and the shop-wide rate spells its own job out: "Default labor rate ($/hr) — used only for custom time-based lines." There is $95 an hour parked behind that field. Most weeks you never reach for it. Why flat pricing beats the clock on work where two techs can spend the same ninety minutes and get different results is argued out in how to price mobile spot repair. This is what the app does once you've decided.
These eight are the buttons the app deals you, and every price is editable. Six of them show in the summary higher up this page; the bumper crack line and the paint-and-materials line exist only down here, where the whole menu is.
One row up there needs reading twice. The summary table prices "Alloy wheel refinish — curb rash, per wheel" at $300. The button in the app is $150. Both are correct, and the reason is that the summary shows a typical ticket while the button shows a unit — the app's pricing table stores that row as a two-wheel reference job, because somebody who curbs a rim usually curbs two. Read the $300 as your per-wheel price and you've doubled a single-rim quote. Bill two wheels at $300 all in and you've done one for free. The button is the price. Every other row in that summary is a whole job, so those read straight.
Paint and materials is a line, not a percentage. Paint, clear, primer, tape, abrasives — one flat row you add once per spray job, which is what the menu hint tells you when it opens. Two scuffs blended on the same car on the same visit is still one materials line. Polish, chip pen and wheel work don't get one at all.
Three taps off the menu and one quantity of 2. Every number is the app's own default — retype any of them and the total follows. This trade books a 0.85 labor share, the same figure the summary above uses to split a $450 deep scratch into $382 of labor and $68 of materials. Which is the warning as much as the reassurance: knock $75 off to close it and about $64 of that comes straight out of your hands. There's no marked-up parts total for a discount to hide in.
The $95 rate isn't decoration, it's just narrow. It drives the row you write when a job genuinely doesn't fit a button — an hour spent pulling and refitting trim to reach the damage, say — and there's a job timer that turns tracked time straight into a labor line at that rate. Everything else on this trade prices off the menu, which is exactly what the rate field's own label admits. If you find yourself reaching for the clock on most jobs, your menu is wrong, not your rate.
Multiplying jobs
On a flat-menu trade the ceiling isn't how fast you blend. It's how many repairs end up on one visit, and how many of the quotes you sent ever come back. The app carries most of both:
- Put the extras on as optional lines and let them decide. Tick "optional add-on" when you add work and that chunk arrives on the approval page with a checkbox beside it. The customer unchecks what they don't want, the total re-adds itself in front of them, tax follows, and what they kept is what you're approved for. The wheels and the headlights go on every bumper quote that way, priced honestly, with nobody having to make a phone call about it. Which tier to actually recommend, including when the cheapest one is the honest answer on a ten-year-old work truck, is priced out three ways on the same keyed door in the guide to flagging hidden damage.
- Know the moment they're reading it. The first time an estimate gets opened, you hear about it — as a push notification, or by email on a handset where push was never turned on. Not as both: the code checks whether a push landed and skips the email if one did. It stays quiet once the estimate has been answered either way, and it won't tell you twice inside six hours. Ring them while the photos are still on their screen.
- The chasing you'd never get round to. A quote nobody replied to is nudged twice, on day three and day seven, then left alone for good. A finished job with money still owing gets reminded on days three, seven and fourteen, each of those emails carrying a link to the job page where the balance settles by card or Apple Pay. All of it is email, addressed to one person about one car. All three have their own checkbox in Shop if you'd rather do the chasing yourself.
- Ask for the review exactly twice, then stop. Completing a job sends one email carrying a single button — your star rating first, then through to your Google page. Silence buys them one gentle repeat a few days later, and after that the job is closed as far as asking goes. Two emails is the ceiling per job, permanently. A ninety-dollar headlight set doesn't earn anyone a pestering.
- A pair of photos sells the next ten jobs. Open a job's photos and select two of them in sequence — whichever you pick first reads as the before, the second as the after — write a caption, and the pair publishes to the work gallery on your public page. A curbed rim beside that same rim refinished argues better than any sentence you could put underneath it. That page is open to anybody, so frame on the panel: no faces, no plates, no house numbers.
- Charge for the drive, then make it shorter. Type the round-trip miles and your rate per mile and it becomes a visible travel line on the customer's document, switchable off again whenever it doesn't suit the job. Behind it the app files the IRS standard mileage rate as that line's cost, so fuel and wear come off the job's profit without you thinking about it. Separately: put addresses on the day's customers and the run sheet turns today's stops into one Google Maps link, ordered the way you're actually driving it.
- Paid before you pull away. They tap the invoice on their own phone and settle it by card or Apple Pay, in the driveway, while you're still peeling tape off a wheel. Card money lands in your own Stripe account and pays out on its normal schedule. Stripe takes 1% for the speed, and the button tells you so before you press it.
Each piece has a page of its own as well: estimates, adding work, getting paid, scheduling, knowing your numbers.
Price it now
Tap the repairs — scuff, scratch, chips, wheels, headlights — add what the materials cost you, and hand back a number before the customer walks back inside. Same free calculator the auto body page runs, right here:
The same calculator lives inside the app, on the Add-work screen, behind a button reading "Build it with the takeoff calculator" — except in there the total it reaches lands on the estimate as priced lines rather than on the back of a parts invoice.
The paper worth keeping
The list further up this page is what a body job captures. This is what leaves your phone on the customer's copy. Six notices print under the totals of every estimate and every invoice on this trade, and two of them earn their place more than the rest.
- The one that keeps you out of trouble is the one that says no. Full panels. Structural or frame damage. Anything airbag-related. One notice states plainly that all of it sits outside mobile SMART repair and that a licensed collision shop with a spray booth is what it needs, and it prints whether or not you remembered to say it out loud. That is the most useful sentence on the document. Knowing which jobs to hand off is what keeps a mobile operator inside what they're registered and equipped to do — and the frame job you turn down costs you a lot less than the one you take.
- What SMART actually promises, in writing, before you spray. A second notice says only the damaged area was refinished and blended into the surrounding panel, and that color match on aged or faded paint is approximate — an exact match can need full-panel refinishing at a booth-equipped shop. That paragraph is the difference between a customer who understood what they bought and one standing in direct sun three weeks later comparing your blend to the rest of the car.
- The other four, and where the rules behind them live. The written-estimate-and-authorization notice, the spray notice recording that any spray-applied work was done with HVLP equipment inside a filtered enclosure under the federal 6H rule, the waste notice recording that the sanding residue, the masking and any leftover paint or solvent leave the site with the operator for an authorized facility; and the flat statement that the app documents and does not certify. The rules themselves, including which spray work is exempt and what California's registration and estimate rules actually require, are written out on the auto body records page with the sources under them. This page is about what ends up on the paper; that one is about why.
- Your registration number, up in the letterhead. There's a field for it in Shop. Fill it in once and it appears at the head of every estimate and invoice under this trade's own label. That is the entirety of what happens: the app reproduces the characters you typed, has no way to check them against anything, and never tells a customer you are registered.
- The car, on file. Year, make, model. The paint code. The panel. And the VIN, which you can point a camera at instead of typing — it reads the barcode off the door-jamb sticker and asks the public NHTSA database for the rest. Paint code and panel stay on the vehicle's record and never reach the customer's document, which is the right place for them: they are notes to yourself for the next time this car turns up, not something a customer needs to read.
- One typed line that ends most arguments. The example note quoted in the middle of this page wasn't written for the page. Open a body job and it's already sitting in the note box in grey, waiting to be typed over; every trade in the app carries its own. Whatever you replace it with prints on the estimate and on the invoice, just above the notices. Skip it and nothing complains — your business, your call. It is also the cheapest thing in the van that has ever saved anyone a weekend.
- Tax season, done in advance. Numbered invoices, the payments against them, and what you spent on paint, clear and abrasives all land in the year-end wrap-up: collected, spent, netted, plus two CSV exports and a summary you can print or save as a PDF. Hand that over and your preparer stops phoning you in March. The paper trail page walks the whole of what a finished job leaves behind.
None of this is legal advice, and the app makes no finding about whether you meet a registration, licensing, air-quality, zoning or waste-disposal requirement — it can't, and it doesn't pretend to. It keeps the record. Whether anyone ever asks to see it isn't the part you get to choose.