Paintless Dent Repair jobs, priced your way and documented right

Priced the way Paintless Dent Repair work is billed

What Paintless Dent Repair jobs actually run

Typical starting prices in the app — your area, your materials, and your reputation move them. You set your own; these just keep you from undercharging on the first quote.

Large dent (baseball and up), priced out

What moves a Paintless Dent Repair price

• Size against the coin — dime, quarter, golf ball, baseball. Each step up is a tier, and a crease jumps a tier or two because the tension is locked along the whole line.
• Aluminum panels — an F-150 hood or an EV door works harder and moves less predictably; +25% is the standard quote, and the VIN decode tells you before you commit to a number.
• Access — a dime-size dent on a bodyline or behind a brace can out-price a bigger dent in open metal, and trim or headliner R&I for access is its own line, not a favor.

What a Paintless Dent Repair job puts on the record

• year/make/model and the VIN — the decode tells you whether that hood or door is aluminum before you price it
• which panel, and steel vs aluminum (+25% is the standard aluminum quote)
• time-stamped pre-work photos of pre-existing damage — the number-one dispute-killer
• an R&I line whenever trim or a headliner came off for access
• on insurance hail work: the claim number and a signed direction-of-pay

Example note on a job: "Aluminum panel — priced +25%. Pre-work photos on file show prior touch-up at the door edge; not corrected by this repair."

How to price a Paintless Dent Repair job in SideWRK

1. 1

   Start the job and add your work

   Open a Paintless Dent Repair job and tap a suggestion like "Small dent (dime–quarter)" or "Medium dent (golf ball)" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.

2. 2

   Price it per dent

   Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, per dent, sized against coins (small $150 · medium $250 · large $450; extra dents on the same panel about half). Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Paintless Dent Repair ticket total.

3. 3

   Note the details

   Add a plain-English note — for example, "Aluminum panel — priced +25%. Pre-work photos on file show prior touch-up at the door edge; not corrected by this repair." — and a photo of the work.

4. 4

   Log what the job needs

   Capture the Paintless Dent Repair-specific records: year/make/model and the VIN — the decode tells you whether that hood or door is aluminum before you price it, and which panel, and steel vs aluminum (+25% is the standard aluminum quote).

5. 5

   Send it and get paid

   Send the Paintless Dent Repair estimate for approval. Your customer approves from their phone, the invoice goes out, and you get paid — card or Apple Pay, on the spot.

Paintless Dent Repair pricing — common questions

Your first jobs

• A photo tells you size. It doesn't tell you access. Somebody texts you a picture of a ding and you can read the coin off it — that's all you get. You can't see the brace behind the panel, and you can't see that the dent is sitting on a hard body line. So quote a range on the phone and close it at the car: "$150 to $225, final once I see it." Nobody has ever been angry about that sentence. Plenty of people have been angry about a number that changed afterward with no explanation.
• Get the yes in writing before the first rod goes in. The customer opens the estimate on their phone, types their name, and taps approve. The typed name is the signature and it lands on the document; your phone pings the second they do it. A verbal "yeah, about $300" with nothing behind it is how disputes start — and on this trade it's also the piece of paper some states expect you to have before you touch the panel.
• When the panel gives up a fourth dent, the app re-asks. Add a line after they've already approved, and if the new total goes above what they authorized the approve button comes back on their page. They authorize the bigger number before you keep pulling. That's the whole reason to send an estimate instead of a text: the record moves when the job moves.
• Set your floor once and stop taking $75 trips. Every trade you run carries its own minimum charge in Shop, and when a job comes in under it, one tap adds a "Shop minimum" line to bring it up. Set yours at your small-dent price. A single ding forty minutes out can't carry the drive, and the app will say so while you can still say no.
• The deposit is a picker, not an argument. Waived, 10, 25, 33 or 50 percent — chosen per estimate, with a shop-wide default so you aren't deciding it twice. Most retail door dings don't need one. A multi-panel job you're holding a whole morning for is a different conversation.

Repeat business

• Your best customers are already sitting in somebody else's bay. Getting a wash and wax, with a door ding the owner has been meaning to deal with for six months and has never once picked up the phone about. A detailer is standing in front of a clean, dry, well-lit car — which is most of what a dent repair needs before you even open the bag.
• The margin is why this pairing pays better here than on almost any other trade. The app's own pricing table books 95 cents of every dent dollar as labor. Six trades sit above that, and every one of them is cleaning or grooming work that consumes nothing but water and product — among the trades that actually fix something, nothing on the platform bills a higher share as your hands. A dent needs no parts. So the second and third dents somebody flags on a visit you were already making are close to pure margin, and the menu prices an additional dent on the same panel at $75 flat, whatever the first one cost. One trip charge, three tickets.
• Everyone says "network with detailers" and then stops there. The referral doesn't happen because you shook a hand at a car show once. It happens because you made flagging a dent cheaper for them than ignoring it: your cell instead of a shop line, a photo and "got a minute?" instead of a phone call, and an offer to do the walk-around yourself on their busy intake days so it costs them nothing at all. Treat the bay the way a plumber treats a general contractor's job site. A standing source of qualified work, worth showing up to on purpose.
• Agree on an actual number. There's no standard split between detail shops and mobile techs, so "I'll take care of you" means nothing to either of you six weeks later. A flat dollar credit per referred job is easier for both sides to track than a percentage, and it never turns into an awkward conversation about what you really charge. Write it down. Then send back a photo of the finished repair — it costs you nothing and hands them proof for the next customer who hesitates on the upsell.
• Quote it while the car is still there. Same visit if you can get there, same day if you can't. A customer standing next to a car that just came out of detailing is in the mood to spend money on it. Give them a week and they'll talk themselves back out of a ding they'd already lived with for six months.
• The app side of a relationship like that is thin on purpose. One customer list, and a job you've done before copies forward — "same as last time" opens a fresh estimate for that customer and that vehicle with the same lines at the same prices, ready to edit. If you'd rather run detailing yourself than partner for it, Multi-Trade at $39/mo unlocks every trade and keeps one client list across them. A used-car lot, a body shop that farms its dent work out, and a fleet yard are the same shape of relationship as the detailer, and they get worked the same way.

How dent work bills

These nine are what the app actually deals you, and you can retype any of them to your market. Six show up in the summary higher on this page; the R&I line and the light and heavy hail rows exist only down here, where the whole menu is.

Multiplying jobs

• Route the day, don't just schedule it. When two or more of today's jobs have a customer address on them, the run sheet chains the stops into one Google Maps multi-stop link, in the order you're working them. Pure URL, no key, nothing to set up. Small thing. On the arithmetic above it's worth fifty dollars an hour.
• Bill the drive when the drive is the job. A travel line goes on the estimate — round-trip miles times your rate per mile — it shows on the customer's invoice, and you can toggle it off anytime. The far-out ding that couldn't carry the trip on its own can carry it with the miles written on the ticket.
• Catch them with it open. Your phone buzzes the first time somebody opens the estimate you sent — a push, or an email if push was never set up on that handset, one or the other and never both, because the code deliberately refuses to double-ping. That buzz is your cue to call. Nothing happens for three days? An automatic nudge goes out, and one more on day seven, and then it stops. An invoice that sits unpaid gets three, at three, seven and fourteen days, each carrying a link that settles by card or Apple Pay. All of it email, all of it one message to one person about their own dent — and each of the three is a switch in Shop you can turn off.
• The review asks for itself, once. Finish a job and the customer gets an email with one button on it — your star rating, then your Google page. If they don't act, one more goes a few days later and that is the end of it: one request, one reminder, per job, hard stop. Nobody gets pestered for a $150 ding.
• Before and after is the entire sales pitch on this trade. In a job's photos, tap two in order — first is the before, second is the after — caption the pair, and it goes onto the work gallery on your public page. Nothing else you could pay to advertise photographs like a panel that was ruined an hour ago. It is a public page, though, so keep faces, plates and house numbers out of the frame.
• Paid before you pull away. The customer approves and pays from their own phone, card or Apple Pay. Need the money that same day? "Get paid now" pushes your available card balance onto your debit card in about 30 minutes; Stripe charges 1% for instant, and the app tells you so on the button.
• Three photos and a sentence, drafted into lines. Photos plus a plain description come back as draft line items, priced at your own rates against this trade's real numbers. It's a Pro feature, and the 14-day trial runs at Pro, so it's there while you're still deciding. Every line stays editable and nothing sends without you.

All of it is running on a seeded dent shop in the live paintless dent repair demo — nothing to sign up for.

Price it now

Inside a job, this exact tool opens as "Build it with the takeoff calculator" — and what it works out drops onto the estimate as real lines instead of onto a notepad.

The paper worth keeping

• The written estimate, authorized before work begins. Paintless dent repair for compensation is regulated as auto body repair in some states. In California that means the operator registers with the Bureau of Automotive Repair — including mobile dent-repair registration, effective October 2025 — and a written estimate has to be authorized before work begins. The approval your customer taps on their phone is that written authorization, and the app prints a notice on the document saying exactly that. Which states, and who they cover, is your state's answer and not this page's. SideWRK documents the work. It doesn't register anybody.
• Your registration number, on every document. Type it once in Shop and it prints in the header of the estimate and the invoice, labelled the way this trade labels it. We print what you typed. We don't know whether you're registered, and we never say you are.
• Photos before the rod goes in. The notice that prints with the job says time-stamped photos of the panel and any pre-existing damage are taken before work begins and are part of the record — and that the repair addresses the dents listed, not pre-existing paint damage, prior bodywork or stretched metal, which get noted when they turn up. That paragraph is why a "you caused this" conversation six weeks later ends in thirty seconds instead of in a bad review.
• The vehicle, on the record. Year, make and model. Which panel, off a list that already knows what panels are called — door, fender, hood, roof, quarter panel, bed side, deck lid or tailgate, or multiple. An Aluminum panel? field sitting right beside it, because that answer is worth 25% and belongs on the record before the price is. And the VIN if you scan it: the camera reads the barcode off the door jamb and the public NHTSA decoder fills in the year, make and model. The notes box prompts for the rest of what sets a price — dent count and coin sizes, whether it's on a body line, access behind the panel, prior bodywork.
• The one line that ends arguments. That disclosure note higher up the page — the aluminum surcharge and the prior touch-up at the door edge — isn't an illustration somebody wrote for this article. It's the greyed-out example sitting in the note box when you open a dent job, because the app carries a different one for every trade. Whatever you type over it prints on the estimate and on the invoice. Nothing makes you type anything. Your business, your call. It's also the cheapest insurance on the truck.
• April, already sorted. Numbered invoices, payments, and the receipts for tabs, glue and blades roll into the year-end wrap-up — money collected, what the work cost, what you actually netted, with an income CSV, a costs CSV, and a print-or-save-PDF summary. Your preparer reads it instead of calling you.

SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice, and it doesn't determine or guarantee compliance with any registration, licensing, insurance or estimate-disclosure requirement. What it does is keep the record you'd want in front of you if anybody ever asks.