What garage booking software does, and the questions drivers ask first.

Garage booking software is two products sold as one. The front half is a booking page a driver reaches from your website or a search result, where they choose a job — test, interim, full, diagnostics, tyres — and a day. The back half is the diary that page writes into: which ramp, which tester, how much time the job blocks out, and what the week already holds. Most garages buy it for the booking page and then live with the diary.

One feature does more work than the rest of the list put together: the registration lookup. A driver types a plate; the system fills in make, model, fuel and engine size from vehicle data, and frequently the current test expiry with it. It saves the driver describing their car, so the page can go straight to asking for a day. Ask to see the lookup fail in a demo — on a personalised plate, on an import, on a van.

The same product is sold under two other names. A garage booking system usually means this exact thing. MOT booking software usually means this exact thing with the test lane modelled properly: a nominated tester on the premises, cars and the larger van classes kept apart, retest windows tracked. Where booking sits inside a full garage management system, the diary is one module among job cards, estimates, invoicing and parts.

Every supplier assembles the same parts in a different order. The difference that matters is where each part stops and hands the job back to somebody at the desk.

Each part works well once a driver has decided, and sits idle before that. That is fair enough: running the week is what it was sold to do. The driver makes up their mind a screen earlier, and on most garage websites the only thing waiting there is a phone number.

Almost no supplier publishes a straight price, because the bill comes in several parts. The quote starts with a monthly subscription — priced by number of sites, by named users, or by how many ramps you run — and everything else is added on top.

• Onboarding and data migration. A one-off fee to load your customer and vehicle history into the new system. Ask what it costs to get that history back out again, in a format something else can read.
• The booking page, priced separately. In several products the public booking page is a paid add-on to the diary, so the part your website actually needs may sit outside the plan you were quoted.
• Reminder texts, bought in bundles. You buy text bundles on top of the subscription. The test-due reminders that make the feature worth having are also what uses them up fastest.
• Commission on slots you did not sell. Work that comes in through a comparison site costs you a fee per job. That fee is separate from the software bill, and the two are easy to confuse.

None of that argues against buying one. A garage running the week off a paper book and a whiteboard is paying for it already, in the advisor's day instead of on an invoice. The question to settle before the demo is simpler: how much of what you are buying runs the week, and how much of it answers the driver who has yet to book?

The demo skips this part, because it happens before the software gets involved. Somebody reading your servicing page has questions a booking page has no field for. They want to know what a test costs with you, whether a courtesy car comes with the job, how long they would be off the road, and whether you take vans. Until those are answered, the slot list is beside the point — they are still deciding whether to ring you at all.

A question like that goes one of three ways, and only one of them reaches your diary. It gets asked on the phone — the call the booking page was meant to prevent. It gets asked of the garage down the road, whose page happened to answer it. Or it turns into a booking made on a guess: wrong job type, wrong length of time, and a ramp held for work the driver never wanted.

• "How much is a test with you?" The test fee has a national maximum and your own price sits under it. Put that price on your page, and the driver who reads it there has no reason to ring.
• "Do I get a courtesy car?" Deposit, licence, minimum age, which jobs qualify — your terms are already written down somewhere on the site. Repeating them down the phone is a job an advisor does over and over.
• "How long will it take, and can I wait?" This decides whether somebody takes a morning slot or arranges a lift, and it is the detail most often missing from a booking page altogether.
• "Do you test vans?" A yes-or-no answer. Leave it off the site and the driver asks a competitor instead.
• "Mine ran out last week — can I still bring it in?" Set this one up deliberately. If your page publishes the answer, it gets read back exactly as you wrote it. If the page stays silent on it, an advisor gets the enquiry with the registration already attached.

Your diary shows every booking you took. It shows nothing about the drivers who left your site with a question unanswered.

A website assistant works on the other side of that line. It answers in writing, in a chat window on the garage's own site, using only pages you have already published — the service ladder, the test page, courtesy-car terms, opening times. Then it takes the plate, the mileage, the expiry read off the certificate in the glovebox and the job the driver thinks they want. The lot goes to whoever picks the slot.

There is one exception, and it is the only time a booking link appears in one of these conversations. Some garages run a public Calendly page — usually for diagnostics and appointment-style work rather than a test lane. There, the assistant answers the questions first and then hands over that link. The driver chooses a time on Calendly's own page. Availability, confirmations and cancellations live in Calendly; the chat window reads none of them.

• It answers from your pages only. Service levels, courtesy-car terms, retest wording, opening times — whatever you published and signed off. A cambelt interval you have yet to publish becomes a handover.
• Faults stay undiagnosed. A knock, a judder or a light that came on gets written down the way the driver put it, then routed to whichever advisor you named for it, safety-critical enquiries first. Whether a car will pass, and how serious last year's advisory is, stay with the tester once it is on the ramp.
• Vehicle records stay out of reach. A DVSA or DVLA lookup sits outside what the chat window can do, which is why the expiry date comes off the certificate in the driver's own glovebox.
• The handover has a name on it. An email alert reaches whoever you set for it, or the driver keeps talking on WhatsApp with their first message attached.
• Prices come off your published list. Work nobody has inspected is captured as an enquiry, in place of an estimate the workshop then has to walk back.

Adoomi's price is flat: the same each month however many enquiries come in. The Free plan costs £0 and includes 50 message credits, with one credit spent per answer. Above that, £8 a month gives you 200 credits, £20 gives 500, and the top plan is £75 for 4,000 — the full price list is published. Setup is a ten-minute job: connect the site, read what it will say to a driver, then add one line. Chat conversations stay on EU infrastructure, a GDPR request exports or deletes them, and the logs hold identifiers in place of anything a driver typed. None of that makes a garage compliant with anything — compliance stays with your registrations, your policies and your processes.

What to buy first depends on where you are losing enquiries today. Here are three workshops and three different answers.

1. A full week and a ringing phone. You are turning work away because you are short of ramp time. That is a diary problem, and the diary is what fixes it. A chat window does a different job — it answers the price-and-timing questions before they ever reach your phone.
2. A quiet week and a busy search page. Drivers find the site, read it, and leave without typing anything. The cheaper first move is the chat window: answer them on the page they are already reading, and take the registration for a call-back.
3. Both, with a clear line between them. The diary holds the week, and the chat window answers the questions that come before a booking. Garages running both tend to move the same job across first: the price-and-timing question that used to arrive as a phone call.

Either way, the order is the same: work out which enquiries you are losing before you shop for the thing that fixes them. A diary fixes the week you can see. The enquiry that died before it became a booking leaves nothing behind, so a review that counts jobs will always miss it. What a chat window handles for this trade is set out on the garages and MOT centres page. The dental answering-service guide draws the same line for a different trade.