🏠 Dent Repair USA · News

Money Up Front

Published July 29, 2026 · Paul Whitehorn

Version 2.8 — July 2026 · Charge a deposit on the estimate, and know who's paid before you load the truck.
YOUR ESTIMATE $1,284 DUE BEFORE WE START Pay $250 Refrigerator dent — glue pull 🚗 Travel fee — $45 Then pick a time PAID APPOINTMENT BOOK $ PAID $ WAITING 💵 Krista paid $295 Ask on the estimate. Get paid before the drive. See it on your schedule.

There's a particular kind of job every tech learns to be careful with. A dent that might come out and might not. A panel you'll spend an hour on before you know. A customer forty minutes away who may or may not be home. You've probably had the conversation where you explain that yes, there's a fee just to attempt it — and then spent the rest of the week hoping they remember.

Version 2.8 turns that conversation into a button.

If the job needs money down, the estimate should be able to collect it — before anyone picks a time, drives anywhere, or takes anything apart.

Put a price on starting

Open any estimate you've sent and attach a fee. Your standard amounts live in Pricing, so it's one tap — "Refrigerator dent — glue pull attempt, $250" — and the wording goes out the same every time instead of being retyped and mistyped per job.

The customer opens the estimate link you already text them and the fee is right there, under a heading that reads Due before we start. They pay it on that page, before they've picked a time. If they book first, the page keeps asking — politely, with their appointment showing above it.

Payment runs through your own connected Square account. The money goes to you directly; we never touch it.

The drive isn't free either

Travel is its own separate, smaller button — deliberately. A customer should see what they're paying for, and you should be able to ask for one without the other.

You can type the amount, or tap once and let the app work it out: it geocodes their address, measures the real drive from your shop, and charges only the miles past the free radius you already set in Pricing, at your own per-mile rate. It fills the box, and you can still change it before you send.

A dollar sign that tells you where you stand

Every appointment you asked money for now wears a dollar sign on your schedule. Grey while you're waiting. Green the moment it clears. Nothing at all if you never asked, so your day doesn't fill up with noise.

And your phone buzzes when the money lands — not the next time you happen to open the app. The point is to know before you're already parked in the driveway.

It covers the older travel deposits too. You think about it as one question — have they paid me? — so one badge answers it, whichever way you asked.

Every estimate you've sent, on one board

The new Estimate Links board shows each estimate you've texted or emailed with its honest status: opened, still cold, or booked. Above them sits your funnel — sent, seen, booked, and dollars booked, this month and all time. It's the number most techs guess at.

Tap any one to attach a fee, or to see whether the last one you asked for has come in.

Requests you can actually vet

"Get an estimate" now runs on our own form instead of an outside service. That sounds like plumbing, and it is — but it fixes something real. Requests used to arrive with no way to tell where they came from, which meant a genuine neighbor and someone five states away looked identical on your board.

Now every request carries where it was actually sent from and a confidence score from 0 to 100. A VPN, a datacenter, a submission from four hundred miles from the address they typed, or the same connection filing under several different names — each one is called out in plain English. If a source is bad, you block it, and everything it sends from then on stays quietly off your board without deleting a thing.

Also in this release

Guided walkthroughs. New tours for My Team, Estimate Requests, and Estimate Links, replayable anytime from Settings → Tutorials & Help. On Android these are now per-feature, the way they've always been on iPhone.

Get it

Version 2.8 (Android 1.5) is on its way to the App Store and Google Play — update when it lands. The web portal side is live today, so you can set your standard fees now under Pricing → Prepay fees and start attaching them to estimates; they'll be waiting on every one you send after that.

Update on iPhone Update on Android Open the Web Portal

Built by a working PDR tech. Questions or ideas? We answer.