Forge Garage Group has served motorists across Bournemouth and Poole for over a century. Led by Karl Payne, it runs five garages: Winton and Magna Road in Bournemouth, the specialist Forge Van Centre in Poole, Ringwood, and Blandford, where it also looks after electric vehicles and motorhomes.
In 2026 the group moved all five garages onto BOOKAR. For Forge, the deciding question wasn't just how the workshop runs. It was how clearly the group can see what every branch is doing against its targets.
One system for five garages
With five sites, Forge needed every garage working the same way, with one customer and vehicle record wherever a driver turns up. Its customers, vehicles, parts and suppliers came across into BOOKAR, so each branch started with its history in place. Staff switch between garages from the navigation bar with one login.
“All I know is that my team love it, and it's just getting better and better.”
Every branch has its own targets
Reporting is at the heart of how Forge runs the group. It sets monthly targets branch by branch, and it builds them from each branch's real costs: rates, utilities and wages, plus a share of the costs the head office carries for the whole group, such as data subscriptions, fuel cards and central salaries.
BOOKAR's reports already cover most of what Forge watches day to day: targets for each location, technician targets, hours sold, the average labour rate and sales year on year, for one branch or the whole group.
Targets for every branch
Monthly targets per location for sales, margin, and parts profit plus labour, with progress against each.
Hours sold and efficiency
Hours sold by kind of work, and hours sold against hours attended for each technician.
Year on year
Net sales month by month, one line per year, for one branch or the whole group.
Every garage, one login
Switch branches from the navigation bar, with customers and vehicles shared across every site.
Bringing the targets into BOOKAR
The costs behind each target still live in a separate targets program. The team enters each branch's costs, shares the head-office costs out between the branches, and the program works out what each branch needs to take. Forge rates the program, but having it pulled into BOOKAR would be, in the team's words, "so much easier".
Forge has walked the BOOKAR team through that program screen by screen, and the two are bringing what's left of it into BOOKAR: the branch cost inputs, sharing head-office costs between the branches, and a labour rate calculator that shows the rate and efficiency each branch needs to hit its target. Figures BOOKAR already holds, such as parts profit, fill in automatically, so nobody keys them twice.
A profit and loss view for each branch is on the list too, to sit alongside the group's accounting software.
More of the website in BOOKAR
Forge's website enquiry forms, including its diagnostic and noise assessment forms, have been rebuilt in BOOKAR. They pick up the website's own styling, customers choose the branch and can add photos and documents, and the team manages every form in the same place as everything else.
BOOKAR's AI Website Chat is going onto the Forge website too, answering prices and free times from each branch's own price list and diary.
Raising the standard
Forge sets out to deliver the standards of a main dealer with the service of a family-run business. With five garages on one system and every branch measured against its own targets, the group can see where each site stands and act on it, from the same screens the workshop uses every day.