12 novembre 2026
How MyTools Helps You as an Auto Repair Shop Owner
Free online tools for auto repair shop owners: thirteen side tasks around the bays, from customer noise videos to warranty claims, handled in your browser.
Running an independent auto repair shop is mostly cars. Listening to a wheel bearing on a test drive, deciding whether a timing belt can wait another season, explaining to a customer why the cheap pads were the reason the rotors are scored. That is the job, and it is the part you are good at.
The rest of the week is files. A customer texts a video of a grinding noise that is too big to forward. The insurance adjuster wants the collision photos as one document. The parts distributor sends next month's prices as a PDF you cannot sort. A fleet customer wants the service history for one truck out of forty. None of it happens under a lift, and all of it lands on the same desk as the phone.
Here are thirteen of those side tasks, each with the free MyTools tool that handles it in your browser. These are online tools for auto repair shop owners that need no install and no account, and they run on the shop computer itself, so a customer's photos and paperwork stay there.
The Grinding Noise a Customer Filmed on the Highway
The customer recorded it at 110 km/h with the phone propped on the dash: three minutes of road, wind, and a grinding sound from the front left that only shows up on the highway. It arrived by text at full resolution. Now you want to send it to the remanufacturer's tech line with your warranty question, and their email rejects anything over 20 MB.
Compress Video takes the clip and offers four presets. Standard is built for email and is usually enough on its own; if the file is still too heavy, drop the resolution to 720p, since the tech line needs to hear the grind, not read the speedometer. The result shows the before and after sizes side by side, so you know it fits before you attach it.
Twelve Seconds of Clunk in a Four-Minute Test Drive
You filmed your own test drive this time, phone clipped to the vent, waiting for the clunk over the speed bump behind the supermarket. It came at minute three. Everything before it is you driving around the block.
Trim Video lets you drag the start and end handles to the twelve seconds that matter and preview the selection before you commit. Fast mode cuts almost instantly but can shift a second or two to the nearest keyframe, which is fine for a clunk. If the customer needs to see the exact moment the suspension bottoms out, switch to Precise and the cut lands on the frame.
A Knock You Can Barely Hear on the Recording
"It does it every morning, I recorded it for you." The voice memo is a minute of a cold engine idling, recorded from the driver's seat with the phone in a cup holder. Somewhere under the fan noise there is a knock. On the laptop speaker in the bay, nobody can hear it.
Boost Audio Volume raises the gain on the whole file, and the limiter holds the peaks at 0 dB so the fan does not turn into crackle when you push it. Press and hold Compare to flip between the original and the boosted version while you listen for the knock. Download the louder copy and play it for the tech who will be pulling the valve cover.
The Worn Pad the Customer Has to See
"The front pads are at two millimetres" means nothing to most people. A photo of the caliper means a little more. A photo with a circle around the pad, an arrow to the scoring on the rotor, and the word "2 mm" written next to it gets the job approved.
Draw Red Circles opens the photo from the shop tablet and gives you a circle, an arrow and a text label, each in red by default. Drag the circle around the pad, drop the arrow on the groove, type the measurement, and download the annotated image to text straight back to the customer. Undo is there for the arrow you drew with a greasy thumb.
Before and After, in One Message
The old control arm next to the new one. The cracked serpentine belt next to its replacement. Customers like seeing what they paid for, and two separate photos in a text thread rarely land in the right order.
Merge Images puts both photos into one picture, side by side with the Horizontal layout, with as much spacing between them as you want. The live preview updates as you change the layout, and the output size is shown before you download. One image, one message, and the old part is unmistakably on the left.
Customer Plates in Your Shop Photos
The restoration job turned out beautifully, and you want it on the shop's Facebook page and Google profile. So do the photos of the busy lot on a Saturday. Every one of them shows a customer's licence plate, and at least two show the customer.
Blur Image lets you drag a rectangle over each plate and each face, then pick a style: blur, pixelate, or a solid black bar for anything you want gone for certain. Load the whole set of photos at once, mark the areas on each, and apply the blur to all of them in one pass before anything gets posted.
Seven Collision Photos for the Adjuster
The adjuster's email is short. "Please send photos of the damage as a single PDF." You have seven photos: the bumper, the crushed headlamp housing, the bent radiator support, and four angles of the same quarter panel.
JPG to PDF takes all seven and lets you drag them into the order the adjuster will read the estimate: front first, then the structure underneath. Set the page size to Letter, pick small margins, and one PDF comes back. The adjuster opens one file instead of seven attachments.
One Warranty Claim, Four Separate Files
The extended-warranty company will pay for the transmission, but only once they receive the repair order, the diagnostic scan report, the parts invoice and the final invoice. Their portal has one upload slot.
Merge PDF combines the four files into a single document, in the order the claims reviewer expects. Name the output file with the claim number before you download it, so it is the first thing anyone sees when the claim gets reopened six months from now.
The Fleet Customer Who Wants One Truck's History
The landscaping company has eleven trucks on your books, and your shop software exports their annual service history as one 64-page PDF. The owner is selling truck number seven and the buyer wants its records. Only its records.
Extract PDF Pages shows every page as a thumbnail. Click the pages for truck seven, or type the range if you know it, something like 23-29, 41, and download them as one clean PDF. The full export stays untouched for the fleet file.
Next Month's Price List from the Parts Distributor
Prices go up on the first. The distributor's new list is a 30-page PDF of part numbers, descriptions and costs, and you want it in a spreadsheet so you can sort by part number and see which of your common jobs need repricing.
PDF to Excel pulls the tables out into an .xlsx file, either one sheet per page or everything merged into a single sheet, which is the one you want for sorting. It works on digital PDFs like a distributor's export. A price list someone printed and scanned would need OCR, which the tool does not do.
A Scanned Invoice That Came Out Sideways
The tow company still hands over paper. You run their invoices through the scanner with the rest of the day's paperwork, and every week at least two pages come out sideways inside an otherwise fine PDF.
Rotate PDF shows each page as a thumbnail with its own rotate buttons, so you turn only the pages that are wrong and leave the rest alone. If the whole batch came out upside down, one Rotate all pages control fixes every page at once. The corrected file goes to your bookkeeper the right way up.
The State Form That Isn't Fillable
The emissions repair waiver needs your shop's details, the repair costs, a few checkboxes and your signature. The state publishes it as a PDF, but not one with fields you can type into. The usual answer is to print it, write on it, and scan it back.
Fill PDF lets you place text anywhere on the page, tick boxes with a check or an X, add today's date, and sign with a signature you draw, type, or upload as a photo of your real one. Everything you add is flattened into the PDF when you download, so the customer and the state office see a finished form, not loose layers.
The Wi-Fi Password Taped to the Waiting Room Counter
Every customer waiting for an oil change asks for the Wi-Fi. The password is on a strip of masking tape on the counter, half rubbed off, and it has a capital letter nobody can see.
QR Code Generator has a Wi-Fi mode: enter the network name, choose WPA / WPA2, type the password, and download the code as a PNG or SVG. Print it on a card for the waiting room, and phones join the network when they scan it. Nobody has to read the masking tape again.
A compressed noise video, an annotated brake photo, a claim packet, a price list you can finally sort. None of it is fixing cars. All of it lands in the same week as the transmission rebuild and the Friday rush of people who want their car back before the weekend.
With those side tasks handled in a browser tab on the shop computer, the time goes back where it belongs: under the lift, with the car in front of you, working out what is actually wrong with it. That is the part of running an auto repair shop that made you open one.