Most garage software is designed for a building with bays, a reception desk and someone sat at a PC all day. A mobile mechanic has a van, a phone and a customer's driveway. This is a plain list of what a one-van business genuinely needs, what it doesn't, and the few UK rules that shape the choice.
Start with the job sheet, on your phone
If the software only works properly on a laptop, it will not get used. The job sheet needs to open on the phone in your pocket, at the car, with greasy hands. That means a few practical things:
- Registration lookup. Type the reg, get the make, model and engine, and have the car saved against the customer without retyping anything.
- Photos on the job. A picture of a worn pad or a split boot does more to justify a bill than a paragraph of notes, and it protects you later if a customer queries the work.
- Notes that survive the day. Mileage in, what you found, what you did, what you advised. If you write it on the back of a receipt, it is gone by Friday.
- Works offline, or near enough. Driveways and farmyards do not always have signal. Anything that needs a perfect connection to save a job will lose you work.
Our guide to job sheet software in the UK goes into what a decent job sheet should capture.
Quotes and invoices on the driveway
The gap between finishing the job and sending the invoice is where mobile mechanics lose money. If the invoice goes out that evening from the kitchen table, it is late. If it goes out next week, some of them never get paid at all. The fix is being able to turn the job sheet into an invoice while you are still stood next to the car:
- Labour and parts itemised, so the customer sees what they are paying for.
- Your bank details or a payment link on the invoice itself.
- Sent by email or text from the phone, with a PDF the customer can keep.
- A quote that becomes the job that becomes the invoice, without typing it three times.
The same goes for quotes. A customer who asks "how much for a clutch?" on the phone wants a number in writing before you turn up, and a written quote is what you point to if the job grows once you are under the car.
MOT and service reminders
You cannot test MOTs from a van. An MOT has to be done at a DVSA-authorised test station with approved premises and equipment, as set out on GOV.UK. That does not mean MOTs are irrelevant to a mobile business. The opposite: the customer whose MOT is due is the one who needs a pre-MOT check, a service, the brakes doing, and then a car dropping at your test-station partner.
So you still want MOT and service due dates stored against every car, and a reminder that goes out automatically a few weeks before. The maximum fee for a car MOT is £54.85 (GOV.UK), so the test itself is not where the money is. The work around it is. Our post on MOT reminder workflows covers the timing; the point here is that a one-van business benefits from reminders at least as much as a workshop does, because you have no passing trade to fall back on.
Parts: what you carry and what you order
A van cannot hold a stock room, so the "parts" problem for a mobile mechanic is less about stock levels and more about not losing track of what you bought for which job. The practical needs are:
- Add a part to a job with the cost price and the price you charged, so the margin is visible on every invoice.
- Keep the supplier invoice number against the job, so when a part fails you can find where it came from in seconds.
- A short list of consumables you always carry (oil, filters, bulbs, brake cleaner) so you can bill them without hunting for a price each time.
Full stock control with reorder points and bin locations is a workshop feature. If a system is charging you for it, you are paying for shelves you do not have.
VAT, tax and the numbers you have to track anyway
This is not tax advice; check anything here with your accountant or HMRC. But three things shape which software is worth having:
- The VAT threshold. You must register for VAT once your taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000 (GOV.UK). A busy one-van business with parts going through the books can get there sooner than you expect, and parts count towards turnover. You want software that shows you the rolling 12-month figure before HMRC does, and that can switch to VAT invoices with the parts and labour split handled properly. Our guide to VAT on parts and labour explains the split.
- Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. Sole traders with qualifying income over £50,000 in the 2024 to 2025 tax year should have started using it from 6 April 2026, with the threshold dropping to £30,000 from April 2027 and £20,000 from April 2028 (GOV.UK). That means quarterly digital records. Invoices that already live in software, not a carrier bag of paper, make this much less painful.
- Mileage. If you use HMRC's simplified expenses for the van, the flat rate for the 2026 to 2027 tax year is 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles and 25p after that (GOV.UK). Either way you need the miles per job written down, and the job sheet is the obvious place.
What not to pay for
A lot of garage management systems price for a workshop with staff. For one person in a van, these are the things to walk away from:
- Per-user pricing. You are one user. If the price is per seat, fine, but check what happens the day you take someone on part-time.
- Setup fees. A one-off fee of several hundred pounds to switch on software is a workshop-sized cost. There is nothing to set up for a van.
- Long contracts. Mobile businesses change shape fast. You might take a unit next year, or go back to employment. Twelve or thirty-six month lock-ins are a bet on a future you cannot see yet.
- Bay and ramp scheduling. You have no bays. A simple diary that shows where you are, with travel time between jobs, is what you need.
- Metered credits for texts and lookups. Sending a reminder should not cost you per message. Ask before you sign.
We compared the published prices of the main UK systems in how much garage management software costs. Most of the three-figure monthly prices are paying for the list above.
The short version
A one-van business needs five things: a job sheet that works on a phone, quotes and invoices you can send from the driveway, MOT and service reminders that run themselves, parts recorded against each job with the margin visible, and records tidy enough that VAT and Making Tax Digital are not a scramble. Anything beyond that is a nice-to-have, and most of what the expensive systems charge for, you will not use until you have a building.