Note: We do not do tech support on these as they are not a part of Digital Wrench.

Below are some helpful links to use your Gmail account or another email account to send Email. For instance Google will not allow you to send bulk Emails through Gmail. However you can sign up for an SMTP Relay service and use whatever email you have to send emails in bulk.

Here is a review for SendinBlue SMTP relay. They also have a service where you can setup emails to send on their system, but to just send Emails from Digital Wrench, you can use their relay.

https://www.trustradius.com/products/sendinblue/reviews#product_reviews

Their website is: https://www.sendinblue.com/

You can send up to 300 emails a day for free. For 10,000 emails per month it's $25 per month. You really only need this if you are using Digital Wrench to market and sending more Emails than your host (Gmail, Yahoo, whoever) will allow.

This is a link to see how you can use the google email but send via a relay service.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en

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Tech Support

We will be raising our yearly tech support from $150 to $200 per year. It works like it did before, if you are within a year of your support expiration, it will cost $200 to renew from your expiration date, or $250 to renew for one year from the day you renew. After one year, it would be $250 plus $200, then $200 for the next year and so on. The maximum of course is the price of the program at that time. You're not just getting tech support, you're getting upgrades to the software so you can get all of the new features we've added.

Gmail

We get a lot of phone calls because Gmail will turn OFF the 'Less secure apps' in the account settings under security. We don't know why this happens. Perhaps if you don't send an email for a period of time it turns it off. If you can't get your email to send, first double check your password by signing out of gmail or your google account, then sign back in by typing in your password. If that works, Check the Security settings. Here is a link to our help about that. Google changes their screens of course, but they're pretty close.

Backup Backup Backup...

We preach about backups a lot because we've seen people lose their data. Imagine losing a $5000 estimate you just did for a customer today or yesterday. Or lose even one or two finished but not paid for invoices. The backup program is defaulted to backup the software to your hard drive. This is because we don't know where the default should go.

But, you should make sure you change it to backup to something external, like google drive, one drive, a USB, an external hard drive, whatever. Also make sure you take it with you when you leave. We've had customers have fires, get their computers stolen (and the USB was still plugged into the computer), and of course viruses and just good old fashioned computer crashes.

Our backup is a simple backup that compresses the files into a zip format then copies that zip file (day_monday.zip, day_tuesday.zip, etc.) to wherever you told it to backup to. Because this is a file backup, your files all have to be closed and you need to do this from the computer that has the data actually on it.

Other ways include having image backups that are automatic. We have a lot of computer techs that tell us that an image backup doesn't care if the file is open, it takes a snapshot. We are working on testing this in the near future. For us we created a backup drive (RAID), that runs on our LAN. We backup to that drive, then we have an automatic program back that up to the cloud. We got a Synology box and two 4TB hard drives that mirror each other. We are using Cloudberry backup software to backup to a cloud service that is only $6 per month per terabyte.

Inspection Software

So we've had a small interface to this online inspection software for quite a while and haven't pushed it much, but with their new screens I've got to say this really enhances our software. The program is at repairshopsolutions.com.

Because we have our new notes section that can store a link or a filename, you can create an inspection then store the link to that inspection in the notes area of the RO, then click on the print button and you will be taken to that inspection right away. You can also link to the PDF report of the inspection so you can automatically print it out with the RO for your customer.

Evidently this increases your sales/repairs when you give the customer a very nice report of the inspection your technician does. And, the tech can send the link to the inspection in a text to the customer so they can see it and discuss it with the tech. Usually you'll want two screens to write the RO up from the inspection information.

The inspections can be modified to suit the kind of vehicles or units you are working on. So this will work with anything from autos to boats to diesel trucks to motorcycles, and more.

Now this is an online program designed for inspections only. But, because it's online it will run on your phone or tablet or whatever you have. This is a great companion for Digital Wrench.

Labor Logger

As you can see, we come up with some very original names for our software.

If you have a subscription, Labor Logger is included. You can also purchase it if you have a current support plan.

What Labor Logger does is simple, it let's you log a technicians hours for a labor item in an RO. This makes it very simple for the techs to sign in and out and track their time for any particular labor item. You can have multiple techs working on the same item. This will give you precise costs and precise times for any particular labor item. It is simple for the techs to use and you can limit what they are allowed to log in and out of too if you setup the security.

While you may think that you would only use this for shops that have multiple technicians, this works very well for a shop that has only one tech, the owner. You know how it is, you're working on a project and the phone rings. This way you click on one button, then when back to work you click on one button. You can log in and out of a job a million times and it gives you very precise totals. I actually use it here to track programming time when I'm doing a project for a customer.

Click here to see a video.

New Scheduler

There's a new scheduler in town and it is very powerful. There's a lot to it, so much in fact we made a video. Click here to watch the video.

You can now schedule techs, or customer, or techs and customers. You can even schedule an RO, or a labor item in the RO. Everything can be seen by the day, week, month and year. We got a template from a company that makes very professional scheduling software, then incorporated it into Digital Wrench. No reason to reinvent the wheel, right?

If you haven't tried it, it's included in the subscription. Click Here to view the video.