Shop software that starts at the bench

Walk into almost any independent shop on a Saturday in May and you see the same thing. The register software was bought to sell bikes, helmets and tubes. The workshop runs beside it on repair tags zip-tied to the stem, a whiteboard behind the counter, and whatever the service manager can hold in their head. The retail system knows what sold. It rarely knows which bikes are on the stands, which ones are waiting on a derailleur hanger, and which customer was promised Tuesday.

Then the phone rings. It is someone asking if their bike is ready, and the person who knows is in the back with a bleed kit in one hand. So the counter walks back, finds the tag, reads the note, walks back, and answers. Multiply that by forty calls a day in season and you have lost a mechanic's worth of hours to a question software should answer.

None of this is anybody's fault. Shop software grew up around retail, because that is where the money was counted. Service got a work-order screen bolted on, and the bench learned to live with it.

BIKE.co is shop-management software for bike repair businesses: service-first shops, e-bike specialists, mobile vans, retail stores with a workshop, rental and fleet operators, and groups with more than one location. It is the Service module of erp.io, presented for bike shops, with the rest of the erp.io suite one login away.

Service is where the work lives: the request, the quote, the job, the checklist, the mechanic's time and the invoice. erp.io modules that already exist handle the rest. Phony answers the phone. CRM holds your customers. Accounting keeps the books. Chat connects the counter to the bench. Service does not keep a second copy of any of it; it links to the module that owns it.

That split matters when you are small. You do not buy a retail POS, a booking tool, a texting tool and an accounting add-on from four vendors and then spend your winters reconciling them. You turn on the modules you need in one workspace.

Service is being built in the open, and we would rather tell you exactly where it stands than sell you a screenshot. The whole request to quote to job to invoice chain is built and running in app.erp.io today. A request lands in the requests inbox. It becomes a numbered quote with line items, optional lines, discount and tax. An approved quote becomes a job with one or more visits, each assigned to a mechanic on the week schedule. A required checklist must be submitted before a visit can close. Then one click bills the job as an invoice, and you record the payment against it.

Around that chain you get checklists with photos and signatures and a PDF for the customer, a clock for technician time with weekly approval, monthly reports on work, money and hours, role-based permissions, and an installable field app that keeps checklist answers and visit completion queued on the phone when the signal drops.

Some of it is still thin, and we say so. Sending a quote or invoice only changes its status: nothing is emailed or texted, and there is no PDF of either yet. Payments are recorded by hand; there is no Stripe, pay link or QR code yet. There is no bike record with serials and history, no parts inventory, and no bench board by repair status. Every page on this site carries a status, Live, Roadmap or delivered by another erp.io module, so you never have to guess.

erp.io is a suite of business modules that share one sign-in, one workspace and one bill. Building Service there means a bike shop gets things that a standalone workshop tool would have to either skip or bolt on: an AI receptionist through Phony, a proper CRM, a ledger, e-signature for waivers and fleet agreements, hiring, training courses for new mechanics, and team chat.

It also keeps the price honest. The same plan ladder covers every erp.io module: a 30-day free trial with every module included and no card, then Starter at $20 per user per month for two modules, Growth at $99 per month with 10 users and five modules, Scale at $399 per month with 50 users, ten modules and white-label, and Enterprise by quote. Extra users are $20 each.

When Service ships a new piece, such as bike records or pay links, it appears in the workspace you already have. You do not migrate to a new product to get it.