About this plugin
PitDesk Auto Repair CRM is a lightweight customer relationship management (CRM) plugin that is completely free for small auto repair shops, garages, and independent mechanics who run their business on WordPress. It turns incoming visit requests into tracked jobs and keeps a full customer and vehicle service history, without the cost or complexity of heavyweight shop-management software.
Customers submit a visit request from a form on your site; your team runs everything else from the WordPress dashboard. PitDesk is self-hosted, fully free forever, and works without WooCommerce.
What you can do
- Capture leads: a builder-friendly visit-request form turns website visitors into leads, with built-in spam protection.
- Manage customers: a searchable customer database with contact details.
- Track vehicles: make, model, year, VIN, license plate, mileage, and more, each linked to a customer.
- Run work orders: move each job through a fixed status workflow, from estimate to closed, with labor and parts line items, tax, and totals.
- Print invoices and estimates: generate a printable or PDF invoice or estimate from any work order, with stable sequential numbering, no WooCommerce required.
- Give customers a portal: a passwordless magic-link login lets each customer view only their own vehicles, service history, current visit status, and invoices, and download their own documents.
- Stay GDPR compliant: WordPress core personal-data export and erasure cover customer, vehicle, and lead data; a shop-configurable retention policy purges old leads and stored IP addresses on a schedule; the visit form records consent with a link to your privacy policy.
- Keep service history: every vehicle keeps a complete, per-vehicle service history you can revisit any time.
- See the shop at a glance: a live dashboard shows open work orders by status, new leads, and customer and vehicle counts.
- Control access: built-in roles for shop owner or manager, front desk, and mechanic.
Who it is for
Independent auto repair shops, mechanic shops, garages, mobile mechanics, and automotive service businesses that want a simple, self-hosted CRM and work-order tracker inside WordPress, instead of an expensive subscription to shop-management software.
Embed the visit form anywhere
The public visit form adopts your theme or page-builder styling and can be added with a shortcode, the block editor, an Elementor widget, or a Divi module. Staff never work from the front end; all shop work happens in wp-admin.
Built for WordPress
- Self-hosted on your own site; your customer and vehicle data stays in your database.
- No monthly subscription, and no WooCommerce or other plugins required.
- Translation-ready, and ships with Spanish (Mexico), French (Canada), Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
- Customer identities live in the plugin’s own tables, never as WordPress users; the portal uses a short-lived, single-use magic link and its own signed session, so customers never get wp-admin access.
Usage
Place the visit form on a public page using whichever tool your site is built with:
- Shortcode: add [wrenchpress_visit_form] to any page, post, or builder text area.
- Block editor: add the “Visit request form” block.
- Elementor: add the “PitDesk Visit Form” widget.
- Divi: add the “PitDesk Visit Form” module.
To give customers a self-service portal, add it to a page with the [wrenchpress_portal] shortcode, the “Customer portal” block, an Elementor widget, or a Divi module. Logged-out visitors see a request form; they enter their email and receive a single-use magic link. Once signed in, a customer sees only their own vehicles, service history, current visit status, and invoices, and can download their own documents.
The portal is read-only and never exposes wp-admin.
The day-to-day flow:
- A customer submits the visit form. It arrives under Leads.
- Promote the lead to a customer, then add their vehicle.
- Create a work order and move it through the statuses as the job progresses.
- Add line items and notes. The vehicle keeps a complete service history you can revisit any time.
- Issue a printable or PDF invoice or estimate from the work order when you need one.
Accessibility
2 Level AA and follows the WordPress accessibility coding standards.
The plugin’s admin screens and dialogs are scanned with axe-core on every change, every dialog is opened and operated by keystroke in a real browser, and appointments can be created and rescheduled from the keyboard alone. Because automated tools cannot judge keyboard operation, visible focus, or screen-reader announcements, the plugin was also tested by hand with the Orca screen reader on Firefox. No other screen reader is tested, and no formal third-party audit or certification is claimed.
The public visit form takes its colors and typography from your theme, so it looks like the rest of your site. One consequence is worth stating: front-end text contrast comes from your theme, so meeting AA contrast there is the site owner’s responsibility. Regardless of your theme, the plugin guarantees a visible focus ring on every field.
The plugin’s own admin screens meet AA, and no state is signaled by color alone: overdue reminders, cancelled appointments, and completed steps all carry a text cue too.
0, core’s own secondary buttons (for example the Search button on every list table) fall just below AA contrast under five of the nine admin color schemes, including the default “Fresh”. This is core’s chrome, identical on core screens like Users and Plugins with no plugin involved, and PitDesk will not restyle WordPress to hide it. Selecting the Modern, Blue, Coffee, or Ectoplasm scheme on your profile raises those buttons above the threshold.
External services
This plugin can optionally use a third-party CAPTCHA service to protect the public visit form from spam and automated abuse. A CAPTCHA is only loaded when a shop administrator selects a provider and enters its keys on the plugin settings screen. No CAPTCHA service is contacted until you enable one.
You choose one of the following:
Google reCAPTCHA v3
Used to score visit-form submissions so bots can be rejected. com/recaptcha/api/siteverify) to obtain a score. Data is sent only when the form is shown or submitted.
com/terms
com/privacy
com/recaptcha
Cloudflare Turnstile
An alternative CAPTCHA used for the same purpose. com/turnstile/v0/siteverify). Data is sent only when the form is shown or submitted.
com/website-terms/
com/privacypolicy/
com/products/turnstile/