A difficult and very important decision is the choice of a program for business maintenance

The main thing is that any full-fledged maintenance system covers all aspects of your business. That is, there should not be such a situation when part of the business processes takes place in the maintenance system, and the other part in third-party programs, for example, in Excel or Notepad. Choose the system that's perfect for your business. Sketch on paper the main business processes of your company today. Also plan how these business processes will change in a year. For example, the appearance of your own courier service, logistics, or now you only repair phones, but plan to repair cameras and laptops. After that, you can safely proceed to the selection of a software product.

Mandatory functions of the maintenance system include:

1. The main function of the warehouse program should be to assign a unique number to each item. Without this function, you will not be able to accurately calculate the profit from each order. The absence of this feature will immediately limit your reporting. You will not even be able to find out from which batch this particular spare part is, and from which supplier you purchased it.
2. The accounting program must have the following functions: settlements with suppliers, accounts payable, receivables, moving between cash desks, logging of all events and transactions, as well as integration with the warehouse program.
3. Basic analytics. Without it, the entrepreneur is deaf and blind. You have to rely solely on your subjective feelings. And they are usually deceiving. What is included in the basic analytics: sales by day, by branch, by manager, performance report by employees, including sales, report on traffic/call/order conversions, average bill, average markup, current/non-current assets of the company, profit and service quality indicators.

There are three basic requirements for the software environment in which you will need to work.

All CRM-systems that are in the public domain are quite simple and primitive. This, of course, has its plus, they are easy to learn and intuitive. This program can be mastered in 15 minutes. But the big drawback is the limited functionality. There are no business processes that you will need in the future. Typically, such programs are designed for the number of employees up to 6-7 people

What are the maintenance systems for service centers?

• Online repair. This is an online service that allows you to maintain a workshop in the cloud (i.e. online), which is quite convenient. This service implements all the necessary basic functions: accepting a repair order, setting a repair status, writing off spare parts for repair, posting spare parts to a warehouse, selling spare parts, linking engineers to repairs, basic maintenance, the function of notifying the client about the readiness of repairs by SMS. This maintenance system is enough to start a small workshop up to 5 people.
• ServiceMy. The interface is intuitive, it is possible to accept devices for repair, change statuses, link an engineer, write off a spare part for repair, take spare parts to the warehouse, sell spare parts and there is a function of notifying the client about the readiness of repairs by SMS. But there are also disadvantages: it is impossible to maintain full-fledged accounting, in the cracked version there are limited rights, any employee can correct the balance for spare parts, there is no logging of actions. ServiceMy is also suitable for small workshops where everything is in sight.
• One-click. The product is intended for maintenance in a service center. The functionality is basic, the interface is similar to ServiceMy or RemOnline. More suitable for customer service on the road, servicing corporate networks, monitoring the processing of applications received by phone.

All the above software products are only suitable for small businesses, although the developers position them as software for medium and large businesses. But in fact, even for a medium-sized business, none of these products are suitable. In the next article, we will take a closer look at the Gincore maintenance system.

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