Mobile detailing software for crews on the road

The one that survives a day with no laptop. A mobile operation is a route, a set of jobs done in driveways and a payment collected at each one, and the software has to hold all three on a phone. Service VIN dispatches the route, carries the job and the guided photos in the technician's hand, and takes payment on a link the customer opens themselves. QuoteIQ and Mobile Tech RX both start cheaper; the tables above say what that buys and what it does not.

Drive time and a van. A stop is not just a time slot — it has an address, a duration and a journey to it, and two jobs forty minutes apart are a different day from two jobs next door. Service VIN schedules each van's day as an ordered route, so the gap between stops is something you can see and shrink rather than something you find out about at four o'clock.

Yes, and it matters more on the road than in a shop, because you are not standing in front of a service board. Every customer keeps their vehicles, every vehicle keeps its past jobs, the coating that went on, the warranty and the before-and-after photos. When a repeat customer books again, whoever is driving can see what was done last time before they knock on the door.

Get paid before you leave. The invoice is built from the job that was actually done, with the deposit already credited and the real material cost on the line so the ticket reports true COGS. The customer pays on a link they open on their own phone — no card reader to carry, no cheque to chase, and the payment lands on the record rather than in somebody's pocket until Friday.

There are cheaper ones and two of them are in the tables above — QuoteIQ from $29.99 a month for a single seat, Mobile Tech RX from $30 a month. What Service VIN is cheap at is crew: Essentials $79, Growth $199, Operations $299 and Command $399 in US dollars flat with no per-seat charge, so a second and third van do not move the bill. The smallest commitment here is the Operations plan at $299 a month.

Yes. The builder is the same one the desk uses, sized for a phone: package tiers, à la carte work, add-ons like pet hair or an engine bay, per-line discounts and an order discount, each priced from real material cost. You can build it standing beside the car, send it for a one-tap approval, take the deposit and have the job on the route before you drive away.

Yes — the AI Front Desk answers the calls you cannot take with your hands in a bucket, texts back the ones that ring out, and books from your real calendar. It answers from your actual services and prices rather than a script, and writes the booking into the system of record instead of promising a callback. Quiet hours and opt-outs are enforced in code.

Yes, and the guided capture is the part that matters — the app asks for the shots in a fixed order so a job is documented the same way every time, whoever did it. The photos file against the vehicle, ride on the customer's job tracker, and are there months later when somebody asks whether that scratch was already on the door.

Yes. There are native import presets for Urable, Tint Wiz and OrbisX, plus QuickBooks Online, Zoho Books and any CSV — customers, vehicles, invoice history, job history and open leads. Mobile Tech RX and QuoteIQ are not native presets, so those come across as a CSV export. Imported records are held apart from the live messaging rails, so a back catalogue cannot text somebody unexpectedly. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial with every feature unlocked.

Service VIN is flat monthly pricing with no per-seat charge — Essentials $79, Growth $199, Operations $299 and Command $399 in US dollars, two months free on annual billing, and unlimited team logins from Growth up. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial with every feature unlocked. What the alternatives publish is in the tables above, each figure with its source and its date.

A solo detailer whose entire need is an invoice and a calendar will pay less elsewhere, and the tables above name two of those tools by price. A business that wants leads bought and ads run for it is describing an agency rather than software. And if you work alone and always will, the parts of this built for a crew — dispatch, roles, an inbox several people share — are weight you will not use.

Tax: your shop sets one rate and every line on an invoice is taxable or exempt against it, so GST at 5 percent or HST at 13 or 15 is a setting rather than a workaround, and the sales-tax report gives your bookkeeper the taxable base, the exempt base and the tax actually charged on an accrual or a cash basis. What it does not do is split one invoice across two provincial rates, because there is a single shop-wide rate and no per-line rate in the data; if you bill at two rates, check that first. CASL is not a switch somebody flips but a set of rails: service and appointment messages are treated separately from marketing, marketing is counted against a per-customer limit, quiet hours and opt-outs are enforced in code, and an opt-out applies across the whole shop. The SMS policy page sets out the rules the product follows, and nothing here is legal advice.