For shops with more than one location

The second location changes everything. At one shop, the owner is at the bench and the standard is whatever the owner does. At two or three, the standard is whatever each service manager decided, and a tune-up at the downtown shop is not quite the same as a tune-up at the trailhead shop. The customer notices before the owner does.

Parts start living in the wrong place. The downtown shop has three Shimano 105 cassettes and the trailhead shop has none, and a bike sits for two days while a new one is ordered. Someone drives parts between shops in their own car and nobody writes it down, so the counts are off at both ends.

And the numbers fragment. Each shop has its own notion of how busy it is, its own spreadsheet, and its own way of writing up a job. The owner wants to know which location is profitable, which bench is behind, and whether the new shop is carrying its weight. Getting that answer means collecting spreadsheets on a Sunday night.

The easiest way to make several shops feel like one is to make the work itself the same. Service checklists are built for that today. The owner or head mechanic builds the templates, and every location fills in the same ones. Required answers mean nobody skips the torque check at the busier shop. Versions mean a change to the template reaches every location at once, while older records keep their original questions.

Roles decide who does what. Service reads each person's erp.io workspace role and checks it on every page and action. Crew at any shop can fill in checklists, close visits and clock their own time but cannot schedule; admins schedule, quote, invoice, build templates, approve timesheets and record payments. Service has in-between roles for a crew lead or a service manager, but reaching them needs a per-person grant screen that is not built yet, so today the choice is crew or admin.

The checklists report brings every submission of a template into one place, with who filled it in, and the monthly reports add work closed, money invoiced and collected, and hours by person. Service has no notion of a location yet, so none of those split by shop on their own. They will tell you how the group did last month and which people carried the hours, but not which shop made the money.

The Service plan's inventory design has stock locations for every shop and every van, on-hand counts, stock used on jobs, transfers between locations, adjustments, cycle counts, reorder points and purchase orders. For a multi-location group, that means the trailhead shop can see the downtown shop has the cassette and request a transfer, and both counts stay right. Inventory is in a later phase of the plan and is not built yet.

Deeper reporting is planned too, covering bench throughput, comebacks and job profitability by location. Financial reporting stays in Accounting, which is live today, and the CFO module is built to forecast the busy and quiet seasons from those books. Service creates invoices today; posting them into Accounting automatically is planned, so the books and the bench agree without re-typing.

If each location is a separate company, erp.io can hold more than one workspace, and each workspace is billed on its own plan.