Two kinds of shop, two kinds of software
Search for heavy equipment shop management software and most of what comes back is built for one kind of shop: the independent repair shop that fixes other people’s trucks and machines, quotes the job, and sends an invoice. That is a real business with real software behind it. It is not the shop most heavy equipment fleets run.
- The repair shop sells hours. Its software is built around estimates, customer approval, invoicing, and payment. Profit is the invoice minus the cost of the job.
- The fleet’s shop recovers cost. It maintains the company’s own iron. Nobody sends an invoice, so the only way the department’s spend reaches the machines that caused it is a loaded shop rate applied to every work order and billed back to the job the machine worked for.
- The numbers point in opposite directions. A repair shop wants billable hours up and overhead tucked inside the labor rate. A fleet shop wants downtime down and every overhead dollar visible on the asset, because that is what decides whether a machine is kept, replaced, or rented out.
Tenmil is built for the second shop. It is heavy equipment shop management software for the maintenance department that owns the fleet: work orders, the parts room, technician time, the shop rate, and billing back to jobs, in one system, with the cost landing on the machine as the work happens. For the wider maintenance picture, hour-based PMs, inspections, and telematics, see our heavy equipment maintenance software page.
What the shop needs to run
Five workflows decide whether a fleet’s shop is a system or a filing cabinet. In Tenmil each one is a transaction with a trail, not a field somebody remembers to fill in:
- Work orders from open to close. Create, assign, and track every job through completion, with labor and parts posting to the asset as the work happens. Deferred repairs, upcoming services, and pending parts live in a running backlog on every asset and drop into a work order when the machine comes in.
- Technician time cards. Hours are tracked directly against work orders and assets, with regular and overtime rates. A weekly view shows every technician’s hours, work orders completed, and status, with a daily breakdown of which jobs the time went to. Approve and export to payroll in one click.
- The parts room. Real-time stock with automated reorder points, purchase orders with approval workflows, receiving, returns, and cross-parts mapping that links equivalent parts across manufacturers. Warranty terms, hours-based or date-based, attach to parts at installation and warn a technician who is about to replace a part the supplier should still be covering.
- Outside work and direct invoicing. When there is no purchase order, an emergency road call or a third-party service invoice, direct invoicing allocates the cost straight to the asset, split across several machines if needed, and updates that machine’s cost per hour.
- Billing back to jobs. Every work order carries the job the machine was working for, so the shop’s spend is charged out as it happens instead of reconciled at year end.
None of it stops at the shop door. The Tenmil mobile app works fully offline, so a technician in a pit with no signal can open a work order, add the part, record the hour meter, and close it, and it syncs when the truck is back in range.
The shop rate is the number that makes it a business
A fleet shop that charges labor at wage rate leaves the building, the service trucks, the tooling, and the supervisor in an overhead bucket that never lands on a machine. At year end that bucket is spread across the fleet by a formula nobody trusts, and every cost-per-hour figure built on it is wrong by the same amount. A loaded shop rate fixes that: add up everything the department spends, divide it by the hours technicians actually log, and charge that rate on every work order.
Tenmil applies your shop rate to every labor hour technicians log, adds parts and outside invoices, and lands the full cost on the asset, so the department’s spend is allocated as the work happens. Build your own rate with the shop rate calculator, and read why that one number decides whether the department is a cost centre or a business in our shop rate guide.
Heavy truck shop management for mixed fleets
Most heavy equipment fleets also run trucks: water trucks, service trucks, lowboys, and the pickups that move crews. The same shop maintains all of it, and the same software should. In Tenmil, trucks and trailers are assets like any other, with their own PM schedules, work orders, parts, and cost per hour, so the shop runs one system for the whole yard rather than one for the iron and another for the highway units.
If you searched for heavy truck shop management software because your fleet is trucks first, the fit comes down to the shop. Tenmil suits a fleet that maintains its own units and needs the cost landed on each one. A shop that invoices outside customers needs repair-shop software built around estimates and invoices. The fleet side of a mixed operation, where the machines are and how hard they are working, is covered on our heavy equipment fleet management software page.
Where the shop’s numbers go
Everything the shop does ends up in one place: the machine’s cost per hour. Labor at the shop rate, parts from inventory, outside invoices, and the ownership cost of the asset roll up to a live figure for every machine, and to the dashboards the fleet is judged on: fleet health, work order status, backlog by machine, and cost by asset. That is the number that settles whether a machine is kept, rebuilt, or replaced, and whether the rate it is billed out at covers what it costs to keep.
Run your own machines through the equipment cost per hour calculator to see how the shop’s labor and overhead change the figure, and see how those costs are tracked over a machine’s life on our equipment cost tracking software page.
Repair-shop software vs the fleet’s own shop
The two categories share a vocabulary, work orders, parts, technician hours, and disagree on what every one of those things is for. Here is how they compare on the questions a fleet shop actually has to answer:
| What the shop does | Repair-shop software | Tenmil |
|---|---|---|
| Built around | Estimates, customer approval, and invoices | The company’s own machines and the work orders against them |
| Labor | Billable hours at a retail rate | Technician hours on time cards, costed at a loaded shop rate |
| Overhead | Hidden inside the labor rate | Captured in the shop rate and applied to every work order |
| Parts | Marked up and sold on the invoice | Stocked, purchased, received, returned, warrantied, and costed to the asset |
| Billing | To the customer | Back to the job the machine was working for |
| The number that matters | Revenue per bay | Cost per hour per machine, ownership included |
| Where the work happens | In the bay, on a shop tablet | In the bay, in the yard, and on the jobsite, offline |
If the left column describes your shop, buy repair-shop software; it will serve you better than a fleet CMMS. If the right column does, the twelve vendor questions in our buyer’s guide will tell you within one demo whether a system can run it.
Pricing you don't have to ask for
Most vendors hide their pricing behind a quote form. Tenmil's is public: per-user plans, free trial, no credit card required.
- Free trial on every plan
- Mobile app included
- Data migration help at onboarding
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about shop management software for heavy equipment fleets.
Software that runs a maintenance shop’s daily work for heavy equipment: work orders, technician time, parts and purchasing, and the cost of every job. For a fleet that maintains its own machines it has a second job: apply a loaded shop rate to labor and bill the work back to the job the machine was working for, so the department’s spend lands on the assets that caused it. Repair-shop software built for invoicing outside customers covers the first half of that list, not the second.
Repair shop software is built around estimates, customer approval, and invoices, because the shop sells hours to other companies. Fleet maintenance shop software is built around cost recovery, because the shop maintains its own equipment and nobody sends an invoice: technician hours are costed at a shop rate that carries overhead, parts are costed from inventory, and each work order is charged to the job the machine worked for. Tenmil is the second kind.
Yes. Technician hours are tracked directly against work orders and assets, with regular and overtime rates. A weekly time card view shows every team member’s hours, work orders completed, and status, with daily breakdowns of which jobs the time went to, and time cards can be approved and exported to payroll in one click.
Yes. The Tenmil mobile app has full offline support: technicians complete work orders, look up parts, and record meter readings where the machine is, with no signal, and everything syncs when connectivity returns. In the shop, the same work orders, parts, and time cards run in any browser.
Yes. Every work order carries the job the machine was working for, and labor at the shop rate, parts from inventory, and outside invoices are charged to it as the work happens, so month end is a report rather than a reconciliation. The same costs roll up to each machine’s cost per hour.
Tenmil publishes its pricing. Professional is $75 per user per month and includes unlimited assets, work orders, the mobile app, parts and inventory, purchase orders, and dashboards. Advanced is $99 per user per month and adds telematics integration, pre-trip inspections, greasing routes, the live GPS fleet map, and advanced analytics. Enterprise pricing is custom. Per-user pricing means the shop’s bill does not climb with every machine you add.
See the shop run in Tenmil
A live, one-hour walkthrough of work orders, time cards, the parts room, and shop-rate labor, built around your own fleet and your own overhead numbers.