When Your Auto Body Shop Looks Full, but Work Isn’t Moving
You’ve got 12 cars “scheduled,” but only 8 are getting touch time today. The rest are parked, half-torn down, or waiting on a yes. When you monitor your collision repair shop, it looks like 100% capacity, but on the floor, it’s closer to a traffic jam.
That gap is where cycle time slips, WIP (Work in Progress) piles up, and you start turning away good work because the bays look occupied.
A “ghost job” is any vehicle on your property that isn’t actively being repaired right now. It’s not a bad job. It’s a stuck job that still consumes space, attention, and scheduling decisions.
The 4 Ghosts Most Shops See Every Week
The supplement revenant: teardown is done, photos are sent, and the car sits waiting for approval.
The parts phantom: an ETA slides, and the vehicle stays staged with nothing to install.
The customer ghost: the repair is finished, but pickup keeps drifting.
The approval specter: the estimate is “under review,” and you keep the car close because you don’t want to lose the job.
The cost isn’t just space. Ghost jobs create false urgency. The team feels like the body shop is full, so they rush the jobs that actually have momentum. That’s when quality slips, comebacks show up, and your schedule becomes harder to trust.
Make Stuck Visible Before It Becomes Normal
The goal is not to be harsh. The goal is to separate repair time from waiting time so you can manage each one on purpose. If a car has no hands on it for two days, it should not look the same as a car mid-repair.
Decision checkpoints that work:
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Build a “Stuck Jobs” list once a week: any vehicle with no touch time in 48 hours, plus the reason.
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Set a firm aging rule: if it’s waiting past a set number of days, it moves to a different status and location.
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Track waiting causes: insurance approval, parts delay, customer delay, and internal queue.
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Price the parking: storage or admin charges only when it’s truly outside your control and documented.
Operational Takeaway
Walk the lot today and count vehicles with no touch time in the last 48 hours. Ghost jobs don’t clear with motivation; they clear when “waiting” becomes a managed task, not a hidden one. With a clear status update on each job, nothing disappears in the shuffle.
