One of the biggest green flags when you’re old-car shopping is a good service history. And as a car owner, efficiently keeping track of maintenance is the best way to stay on top of it. That was part of the inspiration for Manila, a free browser-based application you can use to track your car projects, great and small.
Manila is the brainchild of Matt Schwartz, whom I met through The Motoring Club in LA circa 2017. We’ve kept in touch by liking each other’s wrenching pics on Instagram and chatting at events when I’m back west. He made a post about his new service record tracking program earlier in the summer, and I finally got him on the horn to learn more about it last week.
The way it works is this: You make a file for each vehicle you want to track, then simply start adding notes about what you did to it and when. Critically, there are fields to enter part numbers, tags, pictures, and video, which you can use to save your future self time when you need to revisit a task. It’s searchable, too, making it far superior to the endless email threads and Notes app entries you might have about your car’s various issues.
It also gives you room to just make more abstract notes, like, “X mileage, Y date, noticed leak at valve cover.” Stuff like that, that’s a little more narrative than a simple record of what you bought and when.
For example, Schwartz showed me an entry in his own account for when he swapped the starter on his BMW 2002. He had to make a weird and specific ratchet extension to access a bolt, and so he just logged a picture of that along with the part numbers, date, and odometer reading.
In his words: “I maintain all of my cars myself. I take tons of photos and videos, documenting everything from oil changes to unexpected issues, because I want a clear picture of my car’s journey. But the reality? That story ends up scattered across my phone. I’m constantly digging for a photo, forgetting when something was done, or wondering if I’m overdue for something important. That’s why I built Manila, an app that makes it easy to tell your car’s story. It organizes photos, service logs, and reminders in one clean timeline. It’s simple, visual, and designed for people who want to keep their cars in ‘ready to go anywhere’ condition … So yes, Manila is a maintenance tracker. But it’s more than that. It’s about preserving the stories, and making sure those stories are easier to read.”
In addition to having some experience in the auto-shop software world, inspiration for Manila came from a few places. One, Schwartz was telling me about how he kept noticing how many Bring a Trailer auction listings included pictures of stacks of papers as evidence of service history. “That’s great to see, but I kept thinking, ‘Is that really the best way to keep track of all this stuff in 2025?'” he told me.
Secondly, like many of us, Schwartz was always struggling with the knowledge management of his three project cars, losing track of what was done when and getting frustrated searching multiple apps on his phone to find things.
Finally, he got validation from a classic car mechanic at Fast Cars Ltd. in Redondo Beach. Schwartz was telling me he described a version of his app idea to a younger tech there during a chance encounter, and the mechanic was all about the idea.
“Once I started getting obsessed with the Manila concept, I started realizing how badly I needed it for myself,” Schwartz said.
Manila is not really meant for commercial garage use in its current form. But now, having messed with it a little myself, it does do a good job bridging the gap between a spreadsheet-style data log and a diary. And that’s really what you need to do when you’re dealing with old, quirky cars.
It’s great to simply save your receipts and keep them all in a folder, but it’s far better to have detailed journal entries to look back on with annotations, tags, pictures, and video. Manila gives you a place to consolidate both your personal notes on your project and the specifics you need to substantiate what work’s been done.
In the near future, Schwartz is hoping to add customizable reminders (like, “email me when I’m due for an oil change”) and a way to create public links for service records that obscure costs. With that functionality, as a seller, I could simply drop that link to prospective buyers to let them review everything I’ve done to a car.
Further down the line, he wants to look at adding a personal inventory management system. That might only appeal to the super nerds, but I know I could use it. I’ve got boxes and boxes of parts that go to the nine different vehicles I’m managing, and I re-buy filters and things I already have by accident all the time.
There are more features in the pipeline that could make Manila more useful, too, but Schwartz’s main goal for now is to build the user base and then figure out revenue. He’s looking at tie-ins with parts vendors and auction sites as ways to potentially get paid from the app.
Since Manila lives in a web browser, you can use it with pretty much any mobile device. Schwartz told me he’s going to stick with that system (as opposed to making an iOS or Android app) for portability, cost, and ease of data entry. “If you want to go back and add old records for a project you’ve already had, it’s so much easier to do on a computer than a phone,” he explained.
As the caretaker of nine different vehicles myself, all of which are old and ailing, I’m always struggling with information management. When did I do an oil change on this one? How old is the brake fluid in that one? It’s exhausting. Even if you only have one or two cars, remembering every service, relevant parts, and recording both for yourself and potential future buyers gets arduous if you don’t stay on top of it. More importantly, as impressive as a huge stack of receipts looks, it’s tough to find any one specific data point in it. Manila could be hugely helpful in addressing that exact problem.
I’m still going to be keeping all my receipts in big binders dedicated to each car, but now I’m going to start logging info in Manila and, hopefully, be able to reference it a lot more easily.
Check it out at isitinmanila.com and get a video demo of how it works here.
Know about any other unique apps that car people might appreciate? Send me a note at [email protected].
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