For service-first repair shops

The door opens at nine and there are already four bikes leaning against the counter. One needs a flat fixed while the rider waits. One is a full overhaul that has been booked for a week. One came in with 'it makes a noise' and nothing else. The fourth is a kid's bike with a bent wheel and a parent in a hurry. By noon there are fifteen tags on the rail, two mechanics on stands, and the phone has rung eleven times, most of them to ask whether a bike from Tuesday is done.

None of that is a software problem on its own. It becomes one when the information lives in five places: paper tags, a whiteboard, a text thread on the owner's phone, the parts drawer and someone's memory. The overhaul waits because nobody wrote down that the bottom bracket was on order. The noisy bike gets a new chain when the real problem was a dry pivot bolt, because the intake note did not say what the rider heard. The Tuesday bike is done and sitting on the hook, but nobody called.

A repair shop earns its margin on labor, and labor leaks when the bench does not know what is next, what was found, and what was promised. The job of shop software is to put the ticket, the inspection, the parts and the customer's phone number in one place, so the mechanic with a bleed kit in hand does not have to stop and answer the phone.

The most useful thing a repair shop can standardize is the inspection at intake. When every bike gets the same M-check, with chain wear measured and pad thickness noted, the quote writes itself and the argument at pickup disappears. That is why checklists are the first part of Service that is built. You can make a template for a basic tune-up, one for a full overhaul, and one for a safety check on a bike that has been in a crash, each with the questions in the order your mechanics work.

Required answers stop a checklist being submitted with the brake question skipped. Photos go on the questions where a picture settles things, like a cracked rim or a sidewall cut. The PDF that comes out the other end is something you can hand the customer, and the CSV report lets you look back over a month and see how many bikes came in with worn chains, which is a decent signal for what to stock.

The checklist also lives on the work order. A template can attach itself to every visit and be marked required, and a visit cannot be closed until that checklist is submitted. That is the rule most shops try to enforce with a sticky note: no bike goes back to its rider until the safety check is done and signed.

A job starts as a request, typed in at the counter or sent from a public form, or straight from a quote. The quote carries the inspection findings as line items with quantity, price and a taxable flag, and anything the rider might decline, like the cassette that has another month in it, goes on as an optional line. You mark the quote approved or declined, and an approved quote converts into a numbered job with its visits dated. The lines the rider chose come with it.

The week schedule shows every visit by day. Jobs that have not been given a day sit in an unscheduled queue until someone books them, and each mechanic can switch to just their own visits. Mechanics clock in against the visit they are working on, and a manager approves the week's timesheet. When the last visit on a job is closed, one click turns the job into a numbered invoice, and an admin records the payment when the rider pays.

Be clear on the gaps. A job is recorded against a site, which is an address and a customer name, not against a bike, because bike records with serials are on the roadmap. There is no board of every bike by status yet, and no intake tags to print. Sending a quote or an invoice marks it sent but does not email or text anything, so you still hand it over or send it yourself. Parts inventory, pay links and the 'your bike is ready' text are on the roadmap too.

A shop with an owner and two mechanics on Starter pays $20 per user per month, $60 in all, for two modules, say Service and Accounting. Add a front-counter person and it is $80. At five people, Growth at $99 a month with 10 users and five modules included costs less than Starter's $100, and leaves room for Phony, Chat and Courses. Phony adds $0.12 per minute of call time on any plan.

Every workspace starts with a 30-day free trial, no card, every module on. Build your checklist on day one and run it on real bikes for a month before you decide.