Parts inventory for the shop floor and every van

General field-service tools were built for trades that bill labor and buy materials per job. Jobber, the tool the Service module is modeled against, has no inventory of its own; shops that need it bolt on a marketplace app. A bike shop cannot live like that. Half of every tune-up ticket is parts: a chain, a cassette, two sets of pads, a length of housing, a new cable end you will never bill for but still have to buy.

So the Service plan treats inventory as one of the places it deliberately goes beyond Jobber. Stock is counted by location, parts come off the shelf when a work order uses them, and the cost of what you used flows to the books without anybody typing it in twice. That is the design. It is scheduled for phase P8 of the Service build, after work orders, scheduling, the field app, time tracking and invoicing.

We are saying this plainly because inventory is the question most shop owners ask first. If you need a working parts system tomorrow, BIKE.co is not it yet. If you want to see where it is heading and run your quotes, jobs and invoices in the meantime, read on.

The plan models stock by location. A location is either a building, such as the back room or the wall behind the counter, or a vehicle. Every mobile repair van becomes its own stock location with its own on-hand counts, so you know that van two has four 29 x 2.4 tubes left and van one has none before either tech rolls out on a Saturday.

An item has one record and many stock levels. A KMC 12-speed chain is a single catalog item, with a quantity in the shop, a quantity in each van, and a history of every movement between them. Movements are typed: received from a supplier, transferred between locations, consumed on a job, adjusted, or counted. You can always answer the question "where did those six chains go" by reading the movements, not by guessing.

Transfers are how a van gets restocked. At the end of the day the tech, or whoever runs the counter, moves ten tubes, two bottles of sealant and a handful of derailleur hangers from the shop to the van. The shop count drops, the van count rises, and neither number is a surprise the next morning.

The core of the design is consumption. When a mechanic fits a new chain and cassette to a customer bike, those two items are added to the work order as parts, and the stock level of the location they came from goes down by one each. There is no separate "remember to update inventory" step, because the line on the ticket is the update.

That matters most for the small stuff. Brake pads, cable and housing, ferrules, end caps, tubeless valves, sealant top-ups, bottom bracket bearings and derailleur hangers are the parts that vanish without a trace in most shops. You sell a lot of them, you stock dozens of variants, and nobody writes down the one they grabbed during a busy Saturday. When the ticket is the record, the count stays honest.

E-bike parts get the same treatment. Motor sensors, speed magnets, display mounts, charge ports and wiring harnesses are expensive, slow to arrive and easy to lose track of. Knowing exactly which Bosch or Shimano part is on the shelf, and which one was fitted to which customer bike, is the difference between quoting a two-day turnaround and a two-week one.

Full stocktakes are why shop inventory drifts. They are so painful that they happen once a year, usually in January, and the numbers are wrong again by March. The plan uses cycle counts instead: count one category, one bin or one van at a time, record the result, and let the system post the difference as an adjustment with a reason.

Count tubes on a quiet Tuesday. Count brake pads the week after. Count each van on the day it is restocked. Over a season every item gets counted several times, and the variance on each count tells you something useful: a van that is always short on hangers, or a pad compound that keeps walking out the door.

Every adjustment keeps its reason, whether that is damaged, returned to supplier, warranty or count variance. That history is what lets you tell shrinkage apart from a data-entry habit that needs fixing.