Calculators

Each tool takes numbers you supply and performs a calculation you could do on paper, using the labour rates, materials formulas, markup rules, tax rate and deposit thresholds already published on this site. Nothing is looked up from a market database, nothing is adjusted by a model, and no input is sent anywhere. The arithmetic runs in the page in front of you.

That is a deliberately modest claim and it is what makes the output trustworthy. A tool that promised a repair figure from three inputs would be guessing at the one variable that actually decides a bill, and dressing the guess in a currency symbol. What these do instead is remove the mental arithmetic from decisions an owner is already trying to make.

Hours are the variable that decides a repair bill, and hours are exactly what nobody can know before teardown. On a bonded sidewall the damage boundary is what teardown discovers, so an hour count entered before panels come off is a hypothesis. Feed a hypothesis into correct arithmetic and the output is a precisely calculated hypothesis, which is more dangerous than a rough guess because it looks finished.

Two practical consequences. Run each tool twice, once with a low hour figure and once with a high one, and treat the pair as the real answer. And where a published band gives an hour range for the kind of work you are looking at, use both ends of that range rather than the middle, because the middle of a band is not a more likely outcome, it is just the average of two numbers.

One is a decision tool, one is a cash flow tool and one is a conversion tool, and they are useful at different points. The decision tool belongs before authorisation, when the question is whether a vehicle is worth repairing against what a carrier is offering. The cash flow tool belongs at authorisation, when the question is what leaves your account and when, given the deposit structure and the balance due at pickup.

The conversion tool is the one to reach for when an estimate is already in front of you. It turns hours into money at the posted rates, and its real function is to let you check whether a total on somebody else letterhead is a lot of hours or an expensive hour. That single distinction is the most common thing an owner cannot see in a repair document, and it is arithmetic rather than expertise.

A figure from any of these tools is not an estimate, is not a quote, does not bind this shop and does not authorise any work. An estimate at this shop is written against a vehicle by an estimator who has looked at it, and nothing is cut or ordered until that sheet is authorised. A number produced in a browser has skipped both of those steps and should not be carried into a conversation as though it had not.

Two figures are also fixed and are not outputs of anything. Nothing here is priced below $500, and insurance billed work may be written at carrier negotiated labour rates that differ from the posted retail figures the tools use. An owner running the conversion tool against an insurance estimate is comparing two different rate structures and should expect the two totals to disagree.