Tekmetric API: What Your Shop Can Automate With Carly
A customer declines the rear brakes at pickup, and thirty days later the job is still sitting in Tekmetric marked declined. With Carly on the shop’s mailbox, that customer gets a reminder from the service advisor’s own address the morning the thirty days are up, with the original estimate attached. The same setup sends a “your car is ready” email with the invoice link the moment the advisor texts Carly the RO number, drops a car-count and average-RO summary in the owner’s inbox before the first bay opens, and turns the booking-request email Tekmetric already sends into a confirmed appointment.
Tekmetric’s REST API provides the customer, vehicle, repair order and appointment data underneath. Carly turns that data into the follow-up work a two-advisor front counter never gets to.
Five things a Tekmetric shop can hand to Carly
1. Chase declined work before it goes to another shop
Every Job in Tekmetric carries an authorized flag that records whether the customer approved or declined it. A Carly workflow reads last month’s declined jobs on a schedule, skips anyone who has been back since, and emails the customer from your advisor’s account with the estimate and a link to book. Michael’s shop runs it on the 1st and the 15th. The list comes from the API. The email comes from the shop, not from a marketing platform.
2. Send the “ready for pickup” message from a text
The advisor texts Carly “RO 4821 ready, pickup by 6.” Carly pulls the repair order, generates the share link Tekmetric exposes for the invoice, and emails the customer the total, the link and today’s closing time. No tab switching, no retyping the plate.
3. Put the morning numbers in the owner’s inbox
Before opening, Carly sends yesterday’s closed repair orders, car count, average repair order, and the jobs still waiting on parts, pulled from the repair orders endpoint and formatted as three lines. Emily reads it from her phone on the way in and knows which advisor to talk to first.
4. Turn booking requests into appointments
When a customer requests a slot through Tekmetric’s online booking tool, Tekmetric alerts the shop by email and in the Conversation Center. Carly watches for that email, checks the bay calendar you keep in Google or Outlook, creates the appointment through the API when the slot is open, and drafts the reply when it is not.
5. Catch the parts delay before the customer does
A vendor’s backorder email lands in the shop inbox at 2 p.m. Carly recognises it, adds a note to the matching repair order, and pings the advisor in Slack so the promise time gets updated while there is still time to call.
Three ways Carly works with Tekmetric
On demand, from email or text. Ask Carly for a customer’s last three repair orders before you pick up the phone, or have it create the vehicle record from a photo of the registration. This is the day-to-day use once your API credentials are in.
On a schedule. Declined-work sweeps, the morning digest, a Friday list of appointments with no confirmed phone number. Each is one workflow that queries the API and delivers by email or Slack.
From an event. Tekmetric now lets a shop admin add outbound webhooks under Settings, then Integrations, with a name, a destination URL and the appointment and repair order events to send. That is the real-time path for “inspection complete” and “estimate viewed” style follow-ups. Tekmetric also emails the shop on booking requests, and Carly can start a workflow from an email without any API access at all. If you want the webhook path wired to Carly, book a call and the team sets it up with you.
Carly adds the assistant layer Tekmetric leaves out
Tekmetric is the system of record. It ships two-way texting, automated reminders and Google review replies, and it leaves the judgement calls to your advisors: which declined job is worth a second ask, which customer needs a call instead of a text, which vendor email changes today’s promise times. Carly connects to thousands of apps, so the same assistant that reads Tekmetric also reads the shop mailbox, the calendar, QuickBooks and Slack, and can act across all of them in one workflow.
Three documented apps is not a stack. ChatGPT's event-triggered tasks are documented for Gmail, Slack and GitHub, plus, since September 29, 2026, whichever other plugins support events, a list OpenAI has not published. Claude's scheduled tasks still run on a clock alone. The CRM, the intake form, the billing system and the calendar are where most work actually starts, and none of them is on a published list. Carly is already watching those, and moves the moment something happens.
Carly is free for Zapier-style workflows, with AI agents from $35/month. For the wider picture of what is already built on Tekmetric, see Tekmetric AI and the best AI automation tools for Tekmetric.
Turning the Tekmetric API on
Tekmetric’s API is real and documented at api.tekmetric.com, but credentials are not self-serve. The documented steps, as published on September 30, 2026:
- Complete Tekmetric’s API Application form (linked from the docs).
- Allow 2 to 3 weeks for review. Tekmetric’s docs state that for third-party applicants, submission does not guarantee approval and applications may be declined at Tekmetric’s sole discretion. Apply as the shop, for your own data.
- You receive a Client ID and Client Secret. Exchange them for a bearer token with the OAuth 2.0
client_credentialsgrant. The token’s scope is the list of Shop IDs you have access to. - Paste the credentials at carlyassistant.com/integrations. Carly connects the day they arrive.
Ask for sandbox access at the same time. Sandbox is a full copy of a shop for testing and is granted on request through Tekmetric support.
Reference: what the Tekmetric API exposes
The docs describe the API as letting shop owners grant read-only access to Customer, Vehicle and Repair Order data. The endpoint list is broader than that:
- Reads: shops, customers, vehicles, repair orders, jobs, canned jobs, labor, inventory, appointments, employees.
- Writes: create and update customer, create and update vehicle, update repair order, update job, update labor, add canned jobs to a repair order, create, update and delete appointment, a job clock endpoint, and a share link for a repair order’s estimate, invoice or inspection.
- Not exposed: inspections (no DVI photos or findings) and messaging (no sending texts through Tekmetric’s two-way texting). Follow-up messages go out through your own mailbox instead.
- Limits: 600 requests per minute in production, 300 in sandbox. A 429 response means back off exponentially. Repeated bursting can lead to further restrictions.
- Zapier: there is no Tekmetric app on Zapier. The webhook screen in Settings and the API are the two documented paths.
Frequently asked questions
Can I get a Tekmetric API key myself?
Not from a settings screen. You complete the API Application form and wait for Tekmetric’s review, usually 2 to 3 weeks. Once approved, you exchange the Client ID and Secret for a token and connect Carly with them.
What can Carly do before the API application is approved?
Everything that runs on email, calendar and text: the booking-request emails Tekmetric sends the shop, vendor emails, customer replies, the morning schedule. Add the API when it lands and the repair-order data joins the same workflows.
Does Tekmetric have webhooks?
Yes. A shop admin can add a webhook under Settings, then Integrations, choosing a name, a URL and the events to send. Partners such as Shopgenie document using it for real-time appointment and repair order updates.
Does Tekmetric work with Zapier?
No. There is no official Tekmetric Zapier app. Automation runs through the API, the webhook screen, or the emails Tekmetric already sends.
Is the Tekmetric API read-only?
No. The intro text says read-only, but the endpoint list includes creates and updates for customers, vehicles, appointments, repair orders, jobs and labor.
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