A monthly read on work, money, hours and checklists

Most shop owners do their month-end review from three places: the POS for money, a timesheet spreadsheet for hours, and a gut feeling for how the bench went. Service puts the operating side of that on one monthly report, built from the same jobs, visits, invoices and time entries your team used all month.

Nothing on it is typed in for the report. The visits are the visits your mechanics closed. The money is the invoices you billed and the payments you recorded. The hours are the clock entries on your timesheets. So when a number looks wrong, the fix is in the underlying record, and fixing it there fixes the report.

Pick a month and the report shows work, money and hours, with the Checklists Report beside it for your inspections. It is a table of numbers, not a dashboard of charts, and it is meant to be read in five minutes on a Monday morning.

The work block counts visits closed in the month, visits still booked and visits sitting unscheduled. It also shows the closed-on-the-day rate: of the visits booked for a day, how many were actually closed that day. For a bike shop that is the nearest thing to a promised-date score. A rate that drops in May tells you the counter is promising days the bench cannot keep.

The money block shows what was invoiced, what was collected, what is still outstanding, and what is overdue, which Service counts as invoices sent more than thirty days ago and not yet paid. For a shop with fleet or corporate accounts, the overdue line is the one to act on first.

Collected means payments recorded against invoices in Service. Because payments are entered by hand today, the report is only as current as your last entry, so record them as they come in.

The hours block lists each person with their hours for the month, split into straight time, time and a half and double time. It uses the same California overtime rules as the timesheet, daily eight and twelve hours, weekly forty and the seventh day, so the report and the approved timesheets always agree. That is the figure you hand to payroll until the payroll export ships.

For checklists, the tool is the Checklists Report: every submission of one template, filtered by date range and status, on screen or as a CSV. Columns are keyed to the question, not its label, so a template that asks "Condition?" for the front and the rear brake exports as two columns, and answers given on an older version of the template still land in the right place.

That CSV is where you answer the quality questions today. How many tune-ups found a chain past 0.75 this spring? Which checks are failed most often? Open it in a spreadsheet and count.

The pictured dashboard at the top of this page, with bikes out, average days in shop and comebacks, is the direction, not today's screen. Throughput and time in shop need shop statuses such as checked in and ready for pickup, which work orders do not have yet. Comebacks need bike records, so a repeat visit can be linked to the same bike; those are on the roadmap too.

Margin needs costs. Service knows what you charged and how long people worked, but it does not hold a labor cost rate or a parts cost, so it cannot tell you what a job made. Job costing and a profitability report are on the roadmap. There are no charts and no custom report builder yet either.

Money reports such as profit and loss, aged receivables and sales tax belong in erp.io Accounting, which is live. Service invoices do not post there yet, so until accounting sync ships, those financial reports will not include your bench revenue unless you enter it.