How Steadmere handles the questions PDR shops ask.
Today you build the job in the estimate wizard: pick the customer and vehicle, then add dent lines from the damage matrix. It prices as you go off your own book. That path always works and needs nothing switched on.
The intake that reads a voice-note transcript, a text thread, or a photo of a handwritten sheet into those fields is built, tested, and deliberately not turned on. The reason is what it would cost you: the cheap tier of every AI provider reserves the right to use what you send to improve its own products, and what you'd be sending is your customers' names, phone numbers, VINs and vehicle photos. That isn't ours to hand over to save a subscription fee.
It goes on when there's a paid tier behind it that contractually doesn't train on the input, and the privacy policy commits to telling you before that happens rather than after. If you'd rather have it sooner, say so when you ask for access — that's the kind of thing early shops get a vote on.
Worth answering now, because it's the design that decides whether the feature is safe to turn on at all. A mumbled voice note is a mumbled voice note, and it will get things wrong.
So intake never writes straight to the database: the parse lands in the normal job form with every field editable, and nothing exists until you save it. The AI does the typing; you keep the judgment.
The same rule holds for the AI editor on an existing job. Ask it to change something that matters — a status, a price, a payment — and it shows you exactly what it's about to do and waits. Minor edits like a note or an address apply immediately, and are just as quick to change back.
Three ways, in order of how much you feel like typing. Scan the door-jamb barcode with the phone camera — Steadmere reads the standard Code 39 and Data Matrix formats live. If the label is scuffed past scanning, capture a photo and it reads the printed characters instead. Or type the seventeen characters the old way.
However it arrives, the VIN is validated — length, the characters a VIN can't legally contain — and decoded through the federal NHTSA database, which fills in year, make, and model so the estimate header writes itself.
The damage matrix prices from your book, not ours: size tiers with the coin labels PDR shops actually use, depth multipliers, an aluminum-panel upcharge, and multi-dent discounts. Owners edit the sizes, depths, and modifiers right in the app — changing a number is not a support ticket.
Every estimate locks in a snapshot of the price book at the moment it's created. Raise your rates next month and last month's open estimates still show the numbers the customer agreed to.
You send a link. It opens in their phone's browser — no app to download, no account to create, no password to forget. They see your shop's name, the vehicle, the line items, and the total.
Approving is one tap. Signing is their name plus a finger-drawn signature on the pad, and the signed, timestamped record attaches to the job. Share links expire after thirty days, so an old estimate doesn't float around the internet indefinitely.
Insurance work gets first-class fields, not a note scribbled in the margins. An estimate carries the insurer's name, the claim number, and the adjuster's name and phone, and those details stay with the job through supplement and invoice.
The boundary, stated plainly: Steadmere keeps your claim paperwork straight. It doesn't file claims or negotiate with insurers for you.
No install, no IT. Steadmere runs in the browser on whatever you have — the phone in the parking lot, the tablet in the truck, the desktop back at the office — and you can add it to your home screen so it opens like an app.
The estimate wizard is deliberately phone-first: fields stack vertically, touch targets are sized for thumbs, and the damage matrix works one-handed while you walk the vehicle.
One honest limit: it needs a connection. There's no offline mode today, so a dead zone means talking into your voice recorder until you're back on signal — which happens to be exactly the input the intake was built to swallow.
Photos upload straight to the job and get tagged — before, after, damage, or note — so the gallery organizes itself into a before-and-after story instead of a camera-roll dump.
If your shop turns on "require after photos", marking a job complete is blocked until the after shots are there — the server enforces it, so it is not a reminder you can click past. Leave the setting off and nothing stops you. Either way, the habit is what wins the argument six months later.
Every payment logs against the job: method, amount, date. Deposits and partial payments are normal, and the outstanding balance is always computed from the payment ledger, so it can't drift out of sync with reality.
If you collect through a link — however your shop takes money — the invoice can carry your own pay-now link. Steadmere is deliberately not a card processor: it tracks who paid what and stays out of your money.
Your client list, job history, photos, and invoices are your shop's records. They aren't sold, shared, or mined for someone else's benefit — that's written into the privacy policy, not just this page.
Deletion is real. When a customer asks to be removed, staff can permanently purge their record — contact info, vehicles, jobs, photos — not just hide it from view. Finalized invoices are kept for bookkeeping, as tax rules require; everything else goes.
The honest answer: pricing isn't published because it isn't settled. Steadmere is opening up to a small number of early-access shops, and those shops get asked outright what it's worth to them.
If that's you, request access. You'll get a straight answer about cost, and early shops get a real say in what gets built next.
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