Built at the service desk of my dad’s shop.

I spent years as a service writer at my dad’s shop, Harvey’s Autotech. Building a single quote meant six or seven apps spread across three monitors — the management system, parts suppliers, labor guides, maintenance schedules, vehicle history, shop messaging, a browser full of tabs. Every estimate started with retyping the same customer and vehicle information somewhere new.

On the busiest days, that friction wins. You flip between manuals, you re-key data you already have, and eventually you cut a corner — skip the maintenance check, quote from memory — not because you don’t care, but because the counter is three deep. The tools weren’t bad. There were just too many of them, and none of them talked to each other.

Here’s the thing: we liked our shop management system and didn’t want to replace it. So I built Ascension — the operating layer that rides alongside the system you already run. It reads your repair orders, puts inspections, team chat, and customer concerns in one place, and writes approved work back — so the wasted work is automated instead of retyped.