Shop management for the garage that runs a state inspection lane and a repair bay out of the same building — with an audit trail that's ready before the auditor is.
State inspection stations run their sticker inventory out of a logbook or a desk drawer. So when a sticker gets misprinted and thrown away in good faith, the records show one the shop can't produce. And the auditor doesn't start with the count — he picks issued stickers and works backward, asking for the vehicle, VIN, date, result and work order behind each one. Digging through a drawer while he waits sets the tone for the whole visit.
The second leak is repeat business. Inspections drive the traffic, but nothing tells the customer their sticker is expiring, so next year they go wherever's closest. Declined repair work walks out the same way — quoted, written on a sticky note, forgotten. The obvious fix runs $215–$449/mo once seats and modules are added, and is built around big-shop workflows an inspection lane never touches.
DerMar built GarageForge around the lane instead of around generic shop management. Sticker inventory with an append-only audit trail is the identity feature — and it's in every tier, because compliance shouldn't be something you upgrade into. Stickers are voided, never deleted, every status change carries a timestamped note, and one click exports an audit pack with records, sticker numbers, mileage, inspector certs and a reconciliation summary.
Around that: VIN decode from NHTSA — or from a photo of the plate — inspection records with next-due dates that compute themselves, an SMS-first reminder engine that brings the sticker customer back, deferred-work recovery that keeps following up on declined quotes, and guardrails that refuse to assign an inspection to a tech whose certification has lapsed.
In stock → issued → voided → missing, with a timestamped note on every change. Nothing is ever deleted.
Records, sticker numbers, mileage, certs and a reconciliation summary — as CSV or a print view.
Next-due dates compute automatically and a daily job texts the customer before the sticker expires.
Every declined quote is captured and followed up, with the dollars left on the table shown on the dashboard.
Snap the plate or VIN; NHTSA data prefills the vehicle and pulls up its whole history.
The system warns before a tech's cert expires — and refuses the assignment once it has.
We owned an inspection station before we wrote a line of this. GarageForge is what that experience looks like as software — starting with the drawer full of stickers nobody could account for.
If an audit would mean a bad week, let's talk about building the system that makes it a five-minute visit.
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