Auto Detailing Automation: Reminders, Invoices and Review Requests That Send Themselves

Picture a normal Saturday. Four cars booked, the first at 8:00, the last finishing around 5:30. Somewhere in that day you were supposed to text Monday's customer a reminder, send Thursday's invoice that's still sitting in drafts, ask this morning's customer for a review while the paint still looks great, and check whether the guy who got a quote last week ever answered. None of that happens on a Saturday. Most of it doesn't happen on Sunday either.

That's the real problem auto detailing automation solves. Not "saving time" in the abstract, but the specific messages that fall through because you're the person holding the polisher. This post walks through what Brilla's Automations page actually does, one switch at a time, and what it deliberately doesn't do.

How most detailers handle follow-ups today

Usually it's some mix of three things: reminders typed out by hand the night before, a notes app full of "ask Sarah for review", and invoices sent whenever there's a quiet evening. It works when you have six jobs a week. At fifteen or twenty, things start to slip, and the ones that slip are the ones that make money later: the review that would've brought the next customer, the unpaid $180 invoice that's now five weeks old, the quote that went cold because nobody checked in.

The other common fix is a general marketing tool bolted onto a separate scheduling app. That can work, but the two don't know about each other, so the review request goes out to the customer whose job got rained out, or the reminder goes to someone who already rescheduled.

What the Automations page does

In Brilla, every automatic message lives on one page, Automations, and each one has its own on/off switch and its own setting. Nothing is hidden in a workflow builder. Here's what's there for your customers:

• Appointment reminders (on by default): emails the customer the day before their appointment.
• Invoice when a job is done (off by default): makes an invoice from the job's price after you mark it completed, then either saves it as a draft for you to check or sends it to the customer. You pick the wait: 1, 2 or 4 hours after completion.
• Unpaid invoice reminders (off by default): emails a friendly reminder with the pay link 3, 7 and 14 days after the due date (or after it was sent, if it has no due date). You can turn any of those three days off.
• Review request after a job (on by default): asks the customer for a review once the job is completed, right away or 1, 2, 4 or 24 hours later. The default is 2 hours.
• Quote follow-up (off by default): checks in with a customer who hasn't answered a quote after 2, 3, 5 or 7 days.
• Expire old quotes (off by default): closes quotes nobody answered after 14, 30 or 60 days, so a six-month-old price can't be accepted, and emails you one list a day.
• We miss you (off by default): emails customers who haven't booked in 2, 3, 4 or 6 months.
• Coating renewal reminder (on by default): reminds the customer 14, 30 or 60 days before their coating warranty runs out.
• Rain check (off by default): the afternoon before a job, offers to move it if rain is likely during it.

There are also two that report to you rather than to customers: a Low stock alert that emails you in the morning when a product drops to its low-stock level, and a Weekly summary with last week's revenue, jobs, new clients and what's still owed, sent Monday or Sunday morning. Two more are on the way: Missed-call text-back, which needs Brilla texting (coming soon, see the post), and Deposit at booking, which is on the roadmap.

Review requests: the one worth turning on first

If you only switch on one thing, make it this. The email goes out after you mark the job completed, thanks the customer by name for the job they booked, and includes your review link (the one you set under Settings, Review requests). The default 2-hour delay is there on purpose: long enough that the customer is home and has looked at the car again, short enough that they still remember it.

Asking within hours instead of days matters more than the wording. We wrote about the timing side of this in how to get repeat customers without spending on ads, and it holds up: the request that goes out the same afternoon gets answered far more often than the one you remember to send next Tuesday.

Invoices that make themselves

"Invoice when a job is done" is off by default because people work differently. Some detailers want every invoice checked before it goes out (an add-on got added on the driveway, a discount was promised). For them, the draft setting is the right one: the invoice is built from the job's price and waits in your drafts. Others take payment on the spot and want the paper trail sent without thinking about it; for them, the send setting does exactly that.

Pair it with unpaid invoice reminders and the chasing mostly stops. A customer who hasn't paid gets a polite email with the pay link on day 3, day 7 and day 14, and the reminders stop once the invoice is paid. If you'd rather take the card payment right there in the driveway, you'll rarely need them at all.

What it doesn't do, on purpose

A few things Brilla's automations avoid, because they cause more trouble than they save:

• They don't fire on history. If you import your customers and past jobs from another app, none of those past jobs trigger a review request, an invoice, a reminder or a rain check. Nobody gets a "how did we do?" email about a detail from 2024.
• They're email, not text, for customers. Appointment reminders, review requests, invoice reminders and the rest go out by email from your business. Texting is a separate add-on, coming soon, for the missed-call text-back and text campaigns.
• There's no drag-and-drop workflow builder on the web. Each automation is one message with one setting. That's less flexible than a full marketing suite, and it's also why you can understand the whole page in two minutes.

A sensible starting setup

For a one- or two-person detailing business, this is a reasonable first week:

1. Leave appointment reminders, review requests and coating renewal reminders on (they already are).
2. Turn on "Invoice when a job is done" in draft mode, so you see every invoice before it goes.
3. Turn on unpaid invoice reminders with all three days.
4. Turn on quote follow-up at 3 days if you send more than a couple of quotes a week.
5. Leave "We miss you" off until you've got a few months of customers in the system, then try it at 3 months.

If you do ceramic coatings, the renewal reminder is the one that quietly earns its keep: an install from eighteen months ago becomes a booked maintenance visit without you keeping a calendar of expiry dates.