Sections & Templates
Lens organises every audit into a structured set of sections — the stages of the service lifecycle you work through. Understanding how sections are structured, and how the template that defines them works, helps you use the Canvas efficiently and tailor the audit to each engagement.
Phases
Sections are grouped into five phases that follow the dealership’s service lifecycle:
| Phase | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Acquire | How the dealership attracts service customers — online presence, booking, and scheduling |
| Engage | How the dealership handles the customer on arrival — confirmation, check-in, inspection, and estimate approval |
| Service | How the work is executed — parts availability, productivity, quality, and check-out |
| Retain | How the dealership builds customer loyalty — follow-up, reminders, and repeat service |
| Roll-Up | The synthesis of all findings into a complete picture, action plan, and financial summary |
Sections in the full lifecycle audit
The full lifecycle audit covers 16 sections across the five phases:
Acquire
- Engagement Profile & Objective
- Online Presence & Service Discovery
- Booking & Scheduling
Engage
- Appointment Confirmation & No-Shows
- Check-In & Write-Up
- Inspection & Estimate
- Estimate Approval & Declined Work
Service
- Parts Availability & Allocation
- Repair Execution & Productivity
- Quality & Comeback Control
- Check-Out, Invoicing & Payment
- EV Readiness (cross-cutting)
Retain
- Follow-Up & Feedback
- Reminders & Next-Service
- Loyalty & Repurchase Bridge
Roll-Up
- Synthesis, Roll-Up & Action Plan
The short form covers a prioritised subset of these stages — the ones most likely to surface material findings quickly.
The snapshot model
When you create an engagement, Lens takes the current template and snapshots it into the engagement document. This is important:
- The sections in your engagement are fixed at creation time
- Future changes to the template do not affect engagements that are already in progress
- If you start an engagement today and a new section is added to the template next month, your engagement keeps its original sections
This ensures that your in-progress audit is never disrupted by template updates, and that your signed report reflects exactly the framework that was used.
Section numbers in the report are computed live — they reflect which sections are included at the time you view or export the report. If you remove a section, the remaining sections renumber automatically. If you restore it, it returns to its original position in the sequence.
Including and excluding sections
Not every section is relevant to every engagement. A service-only dealership has no new-car sales team and may not need the full Acquire phase. A body-and-paint specialist may not need the EV Readiness section.
You can remove any section from an engagement by clicking the × next to its name in the Section Rail. The section:
- Disappears from the Section Rail and the report
- Moves to a “Removed” section at the bottom of the rail
- Can be restored at any time with the ↺ button
When you remove a section, the remaining sections renumber immediately. The Total Opportunity updates to exclude any findings from the removed section.
Remove sections before you start working — not after. Removing a section that you have already added notes to does not delete the notes; they are preserved in the document. But the findings from that section will no longer appear in the report until you restore it.
What each section produces
Each section — except the Engagement Profile and the Synthesis — follows the same structure:
- You provide input — documents, notes, or answers to follow-up questions
- Lens produces a summary — a narrative paragraph and a list of specific findings
- The findings appear in the Synthesis — sized in money, ranked by impact
The Engagement Profile produces Key Indicators and a structured dealership profile. The Synthesis assembles everything into the roll-up view and the action plan.