How can a car maintenance software help you ?

What is the most important feature of a car maintenance software ? It's what it does for you, what you get out of it.Let's take a look at the benefits of such a software.

Reduce your vehicle costs while increasing performance and dependability

You cannot reduce vehicle costs until you know exactly where your money is going. Only by knowing your complete operating and ownership costs will you be able to spot problem areas and costs that are higher than average.If youhave been getting 15 miles per gallon for several months and all of a sudden it drops to 10, you know something is wrong and can take steps to correct it. Maybe you just need a simple tune-up (of course, tune-ups aren't all thatsimple anymore on newer cars) or maybe you need to rebuild the carb. Whatever the problem, you can spot it and fixit before it turns into a major problem.

Or maybe you just want to see how much you paid for your last set of tires, how many times they were rotated and how many miles you got out of them. It's easy to do with our programs. And if you want to replace them with the sametire, you'll know exactly what you paid for them and what you can expect a new set to cost. Only a good car maintenancesoftware will help you do all that !

Eliminate costly unscheduled maintenance

Have you ever heard a strange noise, maybe in the drive train or the engine and put off on having it looked at becauseyou didn't have the time to take it in or the money to fix it? And then, a couple of weeks or months later, you ended up spending big bucks for something that could have been fixed inexpensively when you first heard the noise?

The majority of these problems can be eliminated just by regular, scheduled preventative maintenance. A car maintenancesoftware should tell you what service has been done, when it has been done and which ones are overdue. And if you do havean unavoidable problem, you will save time and money by showing your mechanic exactly what work has been done. A servicehistory report will greatly help a mechanic diagnose and fix the problem.

A good quality car maintenance software will let you easily create a maintenance schedule specifically for your vehicleor equipment. And you can add, change or delete operations whenever you want. You can even create a one-time serviceand after it is automaticallyposted to the service history, you can delete it.

Say you were buying a used car and were trying to choose between two identical ones, same year, same color, same mileage,etc. Both owners claimed they took great care of them. And maybe both of them had all of the receipts. How would youchoose? You could sort through the file folder or shoebox full of receipts and hope that they didn't 'forget' to includethe receipts for the 3 quarts of oil that they have added monthly for the last 6 months. Now if one of them also hadtheir receipts entered into a car maintenance software, wouldn't you be inclined to think that they really care abouttheir vehicles? Sure, they could mislead you also, but you have a much better chance of spotting problem areas ifeverything is laid out in an easy to read report.

A car maintenance software will help you avoid being ripped-off by dishonest repair shops

While many large companies have in-house service departments that maintain all of their vehicles, most companies do not.According to Gary Belsky of Money, "Americans spend roughly $90 billion a year to fix their vehicles, and expertsestimate that 25 to 50 percent of that money is lost to fraud or incompetence."

Proper preventative maintenance can save you money and help you avoid more costly problems later. The keyword here is 'proper'. Overzealous preventative maintenance is a common form of car shop rip-offs. Some parts like hoses ortiming belts need to be changed before they fail. But why buy new shocks just because a mechanic tells you, "Theylook fine now, but they could go at any time?"

Most cars built after 1980 have an on-board computer that controls many of the car's systems. You can be out $400to $900 if a crooked repair shop tries to tell you that the computer needs to be replaced when most of the timeit is just an inexpensive faulty switch that is the problem.

Says Allen Wood of California's Bureau of Automotive Repair, "Dishonest mechanics don't rip off every customer - onlythe ones they think are easy to fool." Don't be fooled! Protect yourself by knowing exactly when these parts needto be replaced.

How can you protect yourself from being charged extra for items that are part of a single repair job? By knowingwhat parts and components are necessary for that repair. But how many people can remember off the top of theirhead what components go into a complete brake job? A complete car maintenance software will let you know this exactly andinstantly.