The smallest thing that fully solves it
No speculative features and no settings added to compensate for a bad default. If a screen needs explaining, the screen is wrong, not the person reading it.
In active development for iPhone, iPad and Mac
Software that feels like it belongs to you.
We are a software company with one product and one audience. That product is leaf, a shop management app for the people who keep cars moving. Twenty years of working in automotive repair shops went into it, and all of it rests on one belief: a busy Tuesday afternoon should feel calmer with our software on the counter than without it.
Why we exist
Start with the person at the counter.
Any company can tell you what it makes. Fewer can tell you why they bother. So here is ours, plainly.
Shop software has spent two decades being sold to shops rather than built for them. It is loud where it should be quiet and slow where the day is fastest. It asks a service advisor to think like a database while a customer stands three feet away holding car keys. We have watched good shops lose an hour a day to it. We have watched people apologize to a customer for their own software. That is the thing we could not leave alone.
We believe the trades deserve the same care in their tools that they put into their work. A technician who torques a fastener to spec, then checks it again because it matters, should not be handed an interface that was clearly nobody's pride. Craft recognizes craft. That is the whole reason Leaf Farm exists.
So we build software with a feel. Not features stacked until the box is full. Feel. The kind where the button is already where your thumb went, where the number you needed is on screen before you thought to ask, and where nothing in the app ever makes a person look unsure in front of a customer. Being intuitive is not a coat of paint we add at the end. It is the entire specification.
We would love you to try it and feel the difference in the first ten minutes. If it takes a manual to explain, we have not finished the work.
How we build
Four rules we don't bend.
Polish is not optional
Smooth interactions, sensible defaults, real accessibility with VoiceOver, Dynamic Type and contrast, plus considered empty, loading and error states.
If it ships, it's finished
Every feature works end to end for its scope. No stubs, no half-built screens, no promise to fix it in the next release.
Your data is your business
Your book stays in your own Apple account. We hold no copy of it, we cannot read it, and we will never sell, mine or monetize it.
The app
leaf. The whole shop, on one counter.
A native app for iPhone, iPad and Mac that runs an automotive repair shop from the moment a car arrives to the moment the drawer closes for the night. One app. No server to rent, no plugins to buy, no per-screen upsell.
Repair orders you can see
A stage board for the whole shop floor: waiting, in progress, awaiting parts, ready. Move a ticket and everyone at every register knows.
Customers and vehicles
The book, done properly. Owners, their vehicles, VIN and plate capture, full service history, and fleet accounts billed to a company instead of a card.
Estimates and authorization
Write the estimate, take the signature on the glass, and keep a timestamped record of exactly what the customer approved.
Digital inspections
Check sheets your shop defines, filled in on the device and attached to the ticket, so a recommendation has evidence behind it.
Invoicing and checkout
Cash, check, card, Tap to Pay on iPhone, fleet receivables, and any store or warranty program you take. Discounts, coupons, and a tax breakdown that adds up.
Parts and inventory
Stock, categories, suppliers, purchase orders, receiving, low-stock and reorder views, and receipt scanning that turns a counter ticket into a record.
Your people
Roles with granular permissions, time clock, time cards, shifts, commissions and payroll. Sensitive employee details are encrypted, always.
Day close and reporting
Close the day, reconcile the tenders, get the report. Shop metrics, statistics, and an audit log that answers who did that and when.
Vehicle specifications
Torque values, capacities and service intervals close at hand, corroborated across shops, and always to be verified against the manufacturer.
Service reminders
leaf spots the vehicles that are overdue and drafts the note. You read it, you decide, and it sends from your shop's own email rather than ours.
Search that already knows
One field. A plate, a phone number, a last name, a part number, a ticket. It finds the thing and takes you there.
Built for franchises too
A brand portal for franchisors with live shop numbers and network rollups, while the franchisee's customer book stays the franchisee's alone.
Security
Encrypted in transit. Encrypted at rest.
A shop's book is its livelihood: customer names, phone numbers, addresses, vehicles, money and payroll. We designed leaf so that the safest possible party holds that data, which is you, and so that we are structurally incapable of being the leak.
- Your account, not our server
- Your shop's data lives in your own Apple account's private iCloud database and syncs between your registers through Apple's infrastructure. Leaf Farm LLC operates no server that stores your shop data and holds no copy of it.
- End to end between your devices
- Data moving between your registers travels encrypted over TLS and is protected by Apple's platform encryption at both ends. The app makes no plaintext network connection of any kind.
- Encrypted at rest, on device
- The local store sits inside the device's hardware-backed, passcode-protected encryption, the same protection Apple gives Mail and Messages. In iCloud it is encrypted at rest by Apple.
- AES-256-GCM on the sensitive fields
- Highly sensitive employee details such as a Social Security number are sealed with AES-256-GCM under a key that exists only in the Keychain. The key never enters the database, so a synced record is meaningless without it.
- Login secrets are never stored
- Employee PINs and passwords are never kept. We store only a random per-person salt and a PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 verifier at 120,000 iterations, compared in constant time, with rate limiting at the keypad.
- Secrets live in the Keychain only
- Tokens, keys and credentials are held in the Keychain, never in the database, never in preferences, never in a log, never in source. Nothing sensitive is written to a log file at all.
- Least privilege inside the shop
- Role-based permissions decide who can void a ticket, discount a line, open the drawer or see payroll. A shop lock screen closes the register between people, and the audit log records the actions that matter.
- No third-party SDKs, no trackers
- leaf ships with no analytics SDK, no advertising identifier, no crash-reporting service and no third-party dependency collecting anything. There is no data broker in this app because there is no third party in this app.
- Franchisors see revenue, not people
- Where a brand network is in use, a franchisee publishes revenue rollups and shop-level daily figures. Customer names, vehicles and individual invoices stay in the shop's own account and are never bulk-shared upward.
In plain words
We cannot hand over what we do not hold. Leaf Farm LLC has no database of your customers, no export of your invoices and no ability to read your shop's records. If we vanished tomorrow, your data would still be sitting in your Apple account, encrypted, where it has always been.
FAQ
Questions we get asked.
What is leaf?
A shop management application for automotive repair businesses, running natively on iPhone, iPad and Mac. It handles repair orders, customers and vehicles, estimates and authorization, digital inspections, invoicing and checkout, parts and inventory, employees and payroll, day close and reporting.
Who is it for?
Independent repair shops, multi-location owners, and franchised brands. A single-bay shop and a several-hundred-location network run the same app, with brand features switched on only where a network is in use.
Where is my shop's data stored?
On your own devices, and in the private database of your own Apple account when you enable synchronization. Leaf Farm operates no server that holds your records. There is nothing to rent, nothing to host, and no account with us to create.
Can Leaf Farm see my customer data?
No. We hold no copy of it and have no technical ability to read it. That also means we cannot recover it for you if you lose it, which is why keeping your own backups matters. Our Privacy Policy sets out the boundary in detail.
What happens to my data if I stop using leaf?
It stays where it always was, in your own account and on your own devices, and it is yours to keep, export or delete. Nothing is held hostage, because there is nothing on our side to hold.
Does it work when the internet goes down?
Yes. The app works from the data on the device, so the counter keeps running during an outage. Changes sync to your other registers once the connection returns.
How does it work for a franchise network?
Each shop owns its own data and publishes revenue rollups and shop-level daily figures upward, which the brand portal reads for network reporting and fee tracking. Customer names, vehicles and individual invoices stay with the shop. The franchisor collects what it needs for its own purposes, and Leaf Farm is not a party to the franchise relationship.
Can I bring my existing customers across?
Import from Mitchell 1 and Tekmetric exports is specified and planned before the first shop goes live, with a column mapping step and duplicate matching so running a file twice does not double your book. See the roadmap for its current status.
Is it available yet, and what will it cost?
Not yet. leaf is in active development toward release on the App Store, with a TestFlight round for pilot shops before general availability. Pricing will be published here before release and billed through Apple, so a shop can cancel from its own device without calling anybody. Write to us if you want to be in the first group.
Do you take a cut of my payments?
No. leaf records the tenders you accept, but we are not a payment processor. Card acceptance, including Tap to Pay on iPhone, runs through Apple and your own merchant provider under your agreement with them, and we never receive or store cardholder data.
Who we are
Twenty years in shops. Then we wrote the software.
Leaf Farm LLC is a software company organized in the State of Illinois, United States. leaf is our product, and it is built on more than twenty years of hands-on work in automotive repair shops. Service writing, parts, technicians, payroll, the day close that will not balance, and the customer who arrives at four fifty-five on a Friday.
That experience is why leaf's flow follows the day instead of fighting it. We are not guessing at what a shop needs. We have stood on that side of the counter, and the app is what we wished we had had.
Want to be one of the first shops on it?
Tell us about your shop and we will keep you on the list for the pilot round. One address, and a real person answers it.