CarRestore

The Build Sheet Your Buyer Wants to See

Every long restoration ends with the same conversation: someone — a buyer, an appraiser, a friend who is suddenly very curious — asks where the money went. The honest builder reaches for a shoebox of receipts and a phone full of photos that aren't in any particular order. Hours later, with a spreadsheet half-typed and three receipts already faded, the asking price quietly drops because the story isn't there. CarRestore is the build log that keeps the story straight from the day you drag the car off the trailer to the day you hand someone the keys. Phone-first, offline-first, designed to be used with one greasy thumb in shop lighting.

Receipt OCR That Survives the Garage

Receipts are the part of a restoration that nobody enjoys filing — they fade, they tear, they end up in pockets and tool drawers and on the shop floor. CarRestore's receipt OCR runs entirely on-device, which means it works in the corner of the barn with no signal and your receipts never leave the phone. Point the camera, hold steady for a second, and the vendor name, the date, and the total drop into a confirmation form. Tag the receipt to a part you've already logged or a milestone you're working on, and the cost rolls up into the project automatically. The whole capture takes less time than digging the receipt out of the kitchen drawer two weeks later.

A Parts Catalog That Tracks Status

Parts in a restoration don't exist in two states (bought / installed). They exist in five: wishlist, ordered, received, installed, and — eventually — sold. CarRestore models all of them. The wishlist is where you plan the build before the money goes out: every fastener, every gasket, every chrome trim piece, with a target price and a source. As you order, the parts move to ordered with a date and a receipt link. When the box arrives you mark it received. When it's torqued onto the car, installed. When you change direction and put the take-off carb on eBay, sold — and the money comes back into the cost view. The same data structure that supports the build supports the post-build accounting.

A Milestone Photo Timeline That Tells the Story

Photos of a build live in a phone gallery in chronological order, which sounds useful until you try to find the picture of the floorpan before patch panels went in. CarRestore's milestone timeline is the photo gallery, sorted by build stage rather than by camera roll date — tear-down, body, paint, engine, suspension, interior, electrical, first-start, first-drive, sale. Each milestone holds as many photos as you want, with captions you actually wrote at the time. When the timeline lands in the PDF build sheet, it's the part that closes a sale: the buyer scrolls through years of progress and sees the work.

Cost Rollup You Can Trust at Sale Time

Restorers underestimate cost. It's not a personal failing — it's what happens when receipts trickle in over four years and small expenses compound into something that surprises everyone, including the owner. CarRestore rolls up costs in real time: a pie chart by category (paint, engine, interior, drivetrain, body, electrical, machine work, consumables), a monthly cumulative spend curve so you can see the months where the build accelerated, and per-currency subtotals because a real project car eats parts from three continents. When someone asks "is this worth what you're asking?", the cost view is the answer in three taps.

Multi-Currency, Because Real Builds Cross Borders

Buy a quarter panel from a UK supplier, fasteners from a German hardware house, and an engine rebuild from the shop down the road — and a single-currency cost view starts lying to you the moment you take an exchange-rate snapshot. CarRestore stores every receipt and every part in its native currency: dollars stay dollars, pounds stay pounds, euros stay euros. The cost view shows per-currency subtotals rather than a single misleading total. If you need a one-number summary for a buyer, you convert at sale-time using the rate that actually matters, not a stale rate baked in at receipt time.

Offline-First, Because Garages Are Signal-Dead

Most restoration work happens in places where mobile signal goes to die: a sealed barn, a basement workshop, a friend's pole-barn forty miles from the nearest cell tower. CarRestore is designed so this never matters. Every receipt, every photo, every part, every milestone is stored on your device first. No required account, no mandatory cloud sync, no spinner waiting for a network round-trip. The only outbound traffic is the banner ad on the standard tier and anonymous crash reports — and even those queue up silently and send later. You can work for weeks with the radio off and lose nothing.

Privacy and Data Ownership

The build data is yours. Photos, receipts, parts lists, notes, and milestones live on your device and are not transmitted to ClearStack Apps. They are not sold, they are not shared, they are not used to train a model. Pro adds CSV export of every receipt and part, JSON backup of the full project, and the multi-page PDF build sheet — three different ways to take your data out of the app whenever you want. Uninstall removes every byte from the device. The PDF build sheet you generated yesterday is still yours forever.

Disclaimer — A Log, Not an Appraisal

CarRestore is a record-keeping tool, not a valuation service. The PDF build sheet documents what you spent and when, which is one of the inputs an honest appraiser, buyer, or insurer uses to evaluate a project car — but it is not itself an appraisal, a title document, or a guarantee of value. Always verify VINs, ownership history, and titling separately, and treat any sale value in the cost view as your own running total rather than a market price.