For repair and service businesses
Built in a repair business, by people running one
We are a repair business. Everything on this page runs in our own operation before it is offered to anybody else, which means we are not guessing about what a Tuesday looks like when there are fourteen jobs on the bench and the phone will not stop.
From £39/moplus VAT. Start with one thing and connect more when it earns it.
Manchester based. We run the UK service operation for a European manufacturer as well as our own bench.
A repair business Tuesday, in case you had forgotten
Fourteen jobs on the bench in various states. Three waiting on parts. One that turned out to be worse than quoted and needs a conversation nobody wants to have. The phone has gone six times this morning and you have answered twice.
- A customer is at the counter asking about a machine somebody else booked in.
- Two of this morning's missed calls were new work. You will get to them tonight, probably.
- A quote went out on Friday and nobody knows whether it was read.
- The part you ordered on Monday has arrived, and the job it was for is at the bottom of a pile.
- Somebody wants a device back today and nobody can say for certain whether it is finished.
- And at half five you start the admin, which is when the actual paperwork begins.
The repairs are not the problem. Everything wrapped around the repairs is the problem, and it grows quietly until it is most of the week.
Why repair businesses are a particular case
Plenty of software is sold to service businesses generally. Repair has some specific awkwardness that generic tools tend not to handle, and it is worth naming because it is why we built our own.
The first is that you often cannot quote properly until you have the item. An enquiry is a guess, a diagnosis is the real answer, and the price can change substantially in between. That means every job needs a second approval step that most sales pipelines simply do not have, and handling it badly is where the awkward invoice conversations come from.
The second is that you are holding somebody's property. That carries a duty and a paperwork trail that a plumber fixing a tap does not have. Who booked it in, what condition it arrived in, who has it now, and who signed for it going back out. When something goes missing or arrives damaged, memory is not good enough.
The third is that the work is genuinely unpredictable. A twenty-minute job becomes three hours because a screw is seized, or a board fault turns out to be something else underneath. Scheduling tools built for appointment businesses assume durations are knowable, and in repair they frequently are not.
And the jobs you should refuse
Every experienced repairer has a mental list of work not worth taking: the water-damaged board with a low success rate, the machine worth less than the repair, the customer whose expectations are already unreachable. That knowledge usually lives in one person's head, which means it disappears when they are off and new staff learn it the expensive way.
Writing the triage rules down is one of the most valuable things a repair business can do, and it costs nothing. We did ours before we automated anything, and the document was useful on its own.
Why generic job software struggles
Most job management products are built around a booking with a known duration and a known price. Repair breaks both assumptions at once, so businesses end up bending their process to fit the software, which is the wrong way round and is why so many of these purchases quietly lapse.
We built ours the other way, from an actual bench, and it shows in small ways: the second approval, the condition notes, the parts-waiting state that stops a job disappearing.
Our own workflow, exactly as it runs
Not an illustration of what a repair business might do. This is the path a job takes through Manchester PC today, and the starting point for anything we build for you.
- 01
Enquiry arrives
Phone, website, chat or counter. All four create the same record with the source against it, so nothing depends on who happened to take it.
AI receptionist - 02
Triaged against our rules
Device, fault, likelihood of success and whether we should take it at all. Some are politely declined here, which saves everybody a fortnight.
- 03
Indicative quote
Assembled from a library of priced work rather than written from scratch, then checked by a person before it goes anywhere.
Read the case study - 04
Collection booked
The customer picks a slot, the route is checked, a confirmation goes out and a code is generated for the driver to scan.
- 05
Booked in with condition noted
What arrived, what state it was in, who has it. The record that settles disputes before they start.
- 06
Diagnosis and real quote
The technician sees the full customer conversation, adds findings, and the revised price goes back for written approval.
- 07
Repair, test and return
Parts tracked against the job, waiting states visible, then scanned back out so the trail is complete.
- 08
Invoice and follow-up
Invoiced from the job without retyping, and a review requested at the point the customer is happiest.
Quote and job management
Why we can say this with a straight face
We are not consultants who read about repair shops
Manchester PC started with a bench, a box of screwdrivers and a promise that if you sent us something broken we would tell you the truth about it. That is still the business. We are office based and always have been: we collect and return rather than run a walk-in counter, and the bench is still busy.
For years we also ran the UK service operation for a major European hardware manufacturer. Their returns, their repairs, their customers. That work teaches you things retail never does, because when a national brand hands you their customers you learn quickly what operational discipline actually means. Every unit tracked, every customer contacted, every case closed properly, because dropped things cost somebody real money.
What we did not have, for a long time, was any of that discipline pointed at our own enquiries. We were excellent at the repairs and quietly terrible at everything around them. Calls rang out. Quotes went cold. We rang nineteen open quotes one afternoon out of curiosity and won precisely none of them.
So we built the system we needed and then spent years living inside it, sanding off the rough edges, because we were our own angriest customer. When we set this up for another repair business, we are configuring the same thing that books in our own jobs tomorrow morning.
We are not selling you a theory about repair businesses. We are selling you the thing that stopped ours leaking money, taught your bench instead of ours.
Read the whole storyThe five things that fix the most
In the order we would do them for a repair business starting from nothing.
Answer the phone when you cannot
A receptionist that takes the make, model and fault properly, tells the customer when somebody will ring back, and creates a real enquiry. The highest-value thing we ever switched on.
AI receptionistQuote from a library, not from scratch
Screen replacements, batteries, ports, reinstalls, recoveries. Price the common work once and assemble quotes from it in seconds rather than a quarter of an hour.
Quote and job managementChase the quotes automatically
A polite nudge on day three converts work that would otherwise evaporate. The system has no feelings about whether it seems pushy, which turns out to be the point.
Lead capture and follow-upGet approvals in writing
The second quote after diagnosis, confirmed by the customer against the job. Removes an entire category of awkward invoice conversation.
Ask for the review
At the moment the customer collects a working machine and is pleased, not three weeks later. Repair is a trust business and reviews are how strangers decide.
Content and campaignsStop retyping the paperwork
Supplier invoices read automatically, jobs invoiced without re-entry, marketplace sales reconciled. The evening admin that nobody was hired to do.
Business automationWhat this looks like for different kinds of repair business
Repair covers a lot of ground and the emphasis shifts depending on what comes across your counter.
Computer and phone repair
High volume, low average value, and enormous pressure on turnaround. The wins here are almost all in speed: answering the enquiry, quoting the same day, and telling the customer when it is ready without them having to ring.
Data recovery enquiries deserve their own triage path, because the ones you should refuse and the ones worth taking look identical in an email.
White goods and appliance repair
Mostly on site, which changes the shape entirely. The job views need to work on a phone in somebody's kitchen with one hand, and parts availability drives everything.
The biggest single gain is usually the call handling, because engineers on the road genuinely cannot answer and the enquiries are urgent.
Vehicle and plant
Higher values, longer jobs, and approvals that matter more because the numbers are larger. The written approval step is not a nicety here, it is protection.
Scheduling around bay availability and parts lead times is where the complexity sits, and it usually justifies the operations tier rather than the simple one.
Specialist and restoration work
Low volume, high value, long timescales, and customers who need reassurance across weeks rather than days. Automatic progress updates matter more here than anywhere else, because silence over a long job reads as neglect.
The quote library matters less. The customer communication matters enormously.
The numbers a repair business should actually watch
Most workshops measure turnover and job count and nothing else. These are the four that change decisions, and none of them are hard to collect once the jobs live in one place.
Enquiry to first response
How long between somebody contacting you and a human or a system replying with something useful. In repair this is close to decisive, because a broken machine is an urgent problem and the customer is usually contacting more than one shop.
It is also the number that improves fastest once it is visible. Ours fell noticeably before we automated anything, simply because it was on a screen every morning and people competed with it.
Quote acceptance rate, split by job type
The overall figure is nearly useless. Split by type it tells you something real: which work you are pricing well, which you are pricing badly, and which you keep quoting for and never winning.
We found a category we had been quoting on for years at a rate that almost never converted. We stopped quoting it, which freed up time and lost us nothing.
Jobs waiting, and what for
Not how many jobs are open, how many have not moved this week. Parts, customer approval, a decision from you. Each of those is a different problem with a different fix, and lumping them together hides all three.
This is the single most useful screen in our own system and it takes about two minutes to look at.
Reviews per completed job
Repair is a trust business and strangers decide based on what other strangers said. If you finish forty jobs a month and collect two reviews, that is a leak as real as any missed call, and it is the easiest one on this list to fix.
Where a repair business usually starts
All prices plus VAT, month to month. You do not need all of it and we would talk you out of buying all of it at once.
Catch the enquiries
£99 setup£99/mo
A workshop losing calls while everybody is on the bench
- AI receptionist, 100 minutes a month
- Make, model and fault captured properly
- Answers your common questions
- Callback requests
- Email summaries of every call
Catch and chase
£699 setup£149/mo
Quotes going quiet and nobody having time to chase them
- Everything above, plus the lead pipeline
- Custom quote workflow
- Automated reminders and staff tasks
- Lost-reason tracking
- Conversion reporting
- Five users
The full bench workflow
From £1,500 setup£249/mo
Running the whole shop on one system, the way we do
- Quote converts straight into a job
- Condition notes and custody trail
- Written approval for revised quotes
- Parts-waiting states
- Customer-visible progress
- Invoicing without retyping
If you are not sure which rung you are on, the £99 AI Opportunity Assessment will tell you, and the answer is often cheaper than the thing you were about to buy.
Frequently asked questions
Do you actually still repair things?
Yes. The bench is still busy, and it is the reason any of this exists. We widened what we consider broken rather than leaving repair behind.
Will this work for a two-person shop?
Yes, and the smallest setups often see the biggest proportional gain, because there is nobody spare to answer the phone. Start with call capture at £99 and add nothing else until it has proved itself.
We already use repair shop software. Should we switch?
Not necessarily. If it handles your jobs properly and the gap is enquiries and follow-up, the sensible answer is to add capture in front of it rather than replace it. We will say so rather than selling you a migration.
Can it handle warranty and third-party work?
Yes. Different job types with different rules, different paperwork and different billing routes are exactly the sort of thing we built for, because we run manufacturer work alongside our own retail jobs.
What about parts and stock?
Parts against a job, yes, including waiting states so nothing disappears. Full inventory management is a different problem and we will tell you honestly if you need a dedicated system for it.
How long before it is running?
Call capture is days. A full bench workflow is four to six weeks, most of which is agreeing how your shop actually works rather than building anything. We would rather spend the extra week on that conversation.
Is our customer data safe?
It sits in its own space rather than pooled with anybody else's, backed up and monitored. Repair businesses hold unusually sensitive data, because a laptop contains somebody's entire life, and we take that seriously for the same reason you do.
Can customers check their own job?
Yes, and in a repair business it removes more phone calls than almost anything else we do. You decide how much is visible. Some businesses show the stage and an expected date, others show the technician notes as well. Either way the customer stops ringing to ask whether anything has happened, which frees up the person who would have answered.
What happens to devices we cannot contact the customer about?
The system tracks them and escalates rather than letting them sit in a corner for two years. Uncollected goods are a genuine headache with a legal dimension, and the practical part of solving it is having dated records of every attempt you made to reach somebody. That trail is automatic rather than something you have to remember to keep.
More questions we get asked
Do you work with repair franchises or multi-site shops?
Yes. Multiple sites need roles, permissions and reporting that separate one branch from another while still giving somebody an overall view, which is exactly what the operations tier is for. It is more configuration work up front and the shape is well understood.
We take in work from other trades. Does that complicate it?
Not particularly. Trade and retail customers usually need different pricing, different paperwork and different payment terms, and having them as separate job types with their own rules is straightforward. We run manufacturer work alongside our own retail jobs on the same system for exactly this reason.
Can it print job sheets and labels?
Yes, and the scannable codes are what make the custody trail work. A job sheet that nobody scans is just paper; one that gets scanned on collection, on the bench and on return gives you a dated record of where something was and who had it. That has settled more than one disagreement for us.
What if we mostly get work through a marketplace or a manufacturer portal?
Then the enquiry capture matters less and the workflow matters more. We would look at whether the incoming work can be pulled in automatically rather than retyped, which is usually possible, and focus the spend on the bench side rather than the front end.
What we would tell you over a cup of tea
The things that are true about running a repair business that rarely make it onto a supplier's website, because they do not sell anything.
The first is that most repair businesses are undercharging for diagnosis and giving away the most skilled thing they do. Working out what is actually wrong is the expertise. Replacing the part afterwards is the easy bit, and a lot of shops price as though the reverse were true.
The second is that the jobs you refuse matter as much as the ones you take. A low-success repair on a device worth less than the labour is a slow loss dressed up as revenue, and the emotional cost of an unhappy customer at the end of it is worse than the money. Having written triage rules makes saying no easier, because it stops being a judgement call made under pressure at the counter.
The third is that turnaround beats price for most customers, within reason. People will pay more to have it back on Thursday than on the following Tuesday, and almost nobody advertises turnaround because it feels like a promise you might not keep. If your workflow is tight enough to be confident about it, it is a genuine advantage sitting unused.
The fourth is that the person who answers your phone is doing sales, whether or not anybody calls it that. How that conversation goes decides a meaningful share of your revenue, and in most shops it happens while somebody has their hands inside a machine and is trying to get off the phone.
None of that requires software. We mention it because a systems review usually surfaces at least one of these, and sometimes the most valuable outcome is a change that costs nothing.
Read the detail
The individual services behind everything on this page.
- AI receptionistAnswering the calls that arrive while everybody is on the bench.
- Lead capture and follow-upThe pipeline that stops quotes going quiet.
- Quote and job managementThe bench workflow, approvals and custody trail.
- Business automationSupplier invoices, marketplace sales and the evening paperwork.
- How we cut quote turnaroundThe full case study of our own repair triage and quoting.
- How we sorted our own inboxWhat we did about eighty-three unread emails every morning.
Tell us what your Tuesday looks like
We will recognise most of it. Book a free systems review and we will go through where the enquiries go, what happens to quotes, and which single change would give you the most back.
All prices plus VAT. Month to month, no minimum term.