For retail shops with a workshop

A retail bike shop is really two businesses sharing a door. Out front, the sales floor moves bikes, helmets, tubes and nutrition bars through a point of sale that tracks every SKU. Out back, the workshop runs new-bike builds, free first services, warranty work and a steady flow of repairs. The two meet at the counter, where a salesperson who does not wrench writes up a repair ticket while a customer explains the noise.

The sales floor usually has good software, because retail POS systems have been built for bike shops for years. The workshop often does not. The POS may have a workorder screen, but it was designed to sell parts, not to run a bench. Builds pile up in spring, free first-service tune-ups arrive all at once six weeks later, and the service manager keeps the real schedule on a whiteboard.

The pain is felt at the handoff. The salesperson promises a Thursday pickup without knowing the bench is booked through Saturday. A new-bike build goes out without the pre-delivery inspection written down. A warranty frame swap needs photos and a record that nobody made. The shop sells well and services badly, and service is what brings the customer back.

Think of BIKE.co as the back of the shop. Service covers the repair from the moment it is written up: the request, the quote, the job and its visits on the week schedule, the checklist, the time the mechanic clocks against it, and the invoice when it is done. Parts drawn from workshop stock are the missing piece, since inventory is on the roadmap and parts go on the job as typed lines for now. The showroom does not need any of that, and BIKE.co does not try to sell a bike or a bottle cage.

There is no integration between BIKE.co and any retail POS, and we are not promising one. If you run both, expect to keep two systems: the POS for the sales floor and BIKE.co for the workshop. A shop that does most of its revenue on the floor and a little service may be better served by the workorder screen in its POS. A shop where service is a large and growing part of the business is who BIKE.co is being built for.

The fastest win for a retail shop's workshop is writing down the two jobs you do on every bike you sell: the build and the first service. A pre-delivery inspection checklist makes sure every new bike leaves with the same checks done and a signed record, which matters the first time a customer claims the brakes were never adjusted. A first-service checklist makes the free tune-up quick and consistent, and gives you a list of every customer who came back.

Both work today in Service. Build the templates once, attach them to every visit, and mark the pre-delivery inspection required, so a build job cannot be closed until the inspection is submitted. The checklist report shows you how many builds went out in March.

Roles keep the counter and the bench apart. Service reads each person's erp.io workspace role, and the defaults are sensible for a shop: crew can fill in checklists, close visits and clock their own time but cannot schedule, quote or invoice, while admins can do all of that and are the only people who record payments. The in-between roles, such as a head mechanic who builds templates without being an admin, need a per-person grant screen that is not built yet, so for now you choose crew or admin for each person.