Reorganizing Repair Shops

Coffee shops and custom t-shirt boutiques have no idea the pains that repair stores experience in organizing and maintaining an ever-growing catalog of things to sell. Imagine hundreds of obscure pieces of equipment to repair, multiplied by dozens of services offered for each, not to mention tens of thousands of potential parts needed to complete one of these multitudinous jobs. Exhausted just attempting the math? Imagine running the store.

Local service and repair have both grown exponentially over the past decade, and with it, the ever-expanding range of equipment, types, and variations. RepairQ has been closely following these repair industry trends, creating unique tools that help organize and standardize how shops organize and do business.

“Two decades ago, we simply didn’t have that many options. Technology was limited and consumers weren’t accustomed to the choice range they have today,” explains James Schellhorn, RepairQ Co-founder and Product Creative Director. “It’s easy to see the trends in mobile electronics, like cellphones, which grew from a dozen models to thousands; but look at consumer transit equipment as another example. The options in the 80s were a handful of bicycles, motorcycles, and mopeds releasing every few years. Now we have new things releasing every holiday, including obscure variations of electric scooters, skateboards, the list goes on.”

Organizing services and parts in a repair shop has been virtually impractical in conventional point of sale software, like Square, leaving some shop managers with few options but to simplify by selling a handful of generic services and abandoning customized pricing based on actual cost and effort. And using niche repair tracking software (RepairQ included, James admits) has been tedious, to say the least.

James continues, “We know managing a repair shop has been time-consuming, and we, like many in the industry, have straddled the line between doing it fast and doing it right. However today, we are excited to announce a new alternative!”

Hinted at in our post last week, RepairQ has created a new method of organizing equipment for repair, including categorizing all types, manufacturers, models, and variations. From there, creating an association of parts and services by compatible relationship. And to finish it off, our new platform provides the means to bundle common services and parts together.

For repair shops, this is groundbreaking. Imagine a shop experience where your equipment is identified by “pick and pecking” choices on a tablet. As things like make, model, and problem are identified, you instantly see a consolidated list of solutions and prices. If one is selected, all applicable parts, services, and required tests and workflows can follow, ensuring the job is done right.

“To top it off, RepairQ’s solutions for organizing repair shops can be applied to virtually any category of equipment. We’ve built our reputation on the complexities of cell phone and electronic repair, but anything from music equipment to automobiles can be easily organized and sold with RepairQ,” James states.

These and other repair shop solutions are on schedule to be released this spring of 2019. To track the latest announcements, follow RepairQ at https://www.servicecentral.com/products/repair-q/. For more information on how RepairQ can organize and transform your repair business, visit https://sales.repairq.io.