Restoration & Hot Rods
A two-year build shouldn't mean two years of carrying the cost.
Restoration isn't repair. A frame-off build runs months or years, the scope changes as you go, and the whole time you're managing a customer's money — and their patience. Tools built for quick-turn repair shops fall apart the moment a job doesn't close out in a week.
Why general-repair shop software doesn't cut it
Shop management systems built for general repair are designed around a car that comes in, gets fixed, gets billed, and leaves in a day or two. Restoration breaks every one of those assumptions. You can't bill a $90k build in one invoice at the end. You can't track an 18-month project the way you track an oil change. And you've got no clean way to show the owner where their money's gone. That's the gap MSA fills.
Bill for the work as it happens
Progress billing is the heart of it — and in MSA it runs right off the way the work is already tracked.
Every job breaks down into individual tasks, and your technicians log time against each task as they work it. Any task can be set up as an hourly service, so that tracked time becomes billable labor automatically. Every time entry — and every part added to the job — carries a date stamp.
.jpg)
When you're ready to invoice, you run a billing cycle for a date range. MSA pulls every time entry and every part logged inside that window and builds a time-and-materials bill from it: the real labor hours and parts that went into the car during that period.
So instead of one giant invoice when the keys go back, you bill in honest increments — the customer pays for the work and parts that actually went into their build since the last invoice. Cash keeps coming in across a long job, and every line is backed by dated, task-level records you can stand behind if a customer ever asks what they paid for.
Know exactly where every build stands
Your techs track time against the tasks they're working. The Work Completed dashboard rolls that into real-time production numbers — what's done, what's in progress, how the floor is performing — so management sees the status of every build without walking the shop or chasing people for updates.
.JPG)
A complete record of the build
Restoration lives on documentation, and MSA is built for it:
- Unlimited photos and files on every job — a full visual history from bare metal to finished.
- User- and date-stamped comments on every task — exactly who did what, and when.
- Checklists, descriptions, and internal notes on each task, so nothing slips on a project that runs months and passes through a dozen hands.
- Folders within each job to segment and organize the work — break a big build into sections so every tech can see at a glance what's theirs, instead of scrolling one giant task list.