Hi, just after some thoughts from some other garage owners on there diagnostic policy or in my case lack of.
I'm located in the south west with quite a close knit community but with a large capture area for business. We always get phone calls from customers old and new saying their engine light is on and we always tell them to just come in and we'll do a quick scan, no booking in or time arrangements, when they arrive we normally send a mechanic out and do the scan but we never charge for this, and we rarely ever add the cost onto the invoice when they come and have it repaired.
What do you guys normally do, do you have a strict book it in only policy and charge for an hour and see where you get in the hour and then contact the customer and say well we've spent an hour and we're heading in this direction do you want to spend another hours labour etc. Or do you loose hours of your life looking for faults knowing you can never charge the labour for the amount of time you've been on it. And what if you find the problem in 5-10mins do you still charge an hour or only charge for 10 mins labour. I think I'm worried as a business owner that if I start telling customers that from now on your going to be charged £35+vat just to take a look that they'll just disappear after coming here and getting the initial scan done for free. I'm sure most will be happy to pay when I explain the cost involved in investing in equipment.
I'm just after some thoughts of what other garages do I rarely get an insight into other garages and how they manage this situation.

I know this isn't a tech topic, I just thought it would get more traffic here.