Service work flow advice for new user?

[Cool_1861]

Hey all, I run a bike shop and am switching over from Lightspeed.  Despite its quirks, with that platform I had a clear workflow of initiating service tickets, fitting them into a schedule, and closing them out as sales.  I'm trying to figure out the best way to use Square for this.  Eventually online booking seems attractive, but the majority of our service work will walk through the door.  There doesn't appear to be a way to convert an open ticket to a scheduled appointment.  I can leave the ticket open until the work is done...but then what to do about scheduling?  

Hope this question is making sense.  Anyone else here run a business that takes walk-in projects and fulfills them over the course of days, weeks? What do you do?

Thanks!

Zach

[Ellie_]

Hi there, @Cool_1861,

You’re definitely making sense, and you’re not alone in feeling this friction when coming from Lightspeed. Square approaches service and scheduling a bit differently, and it can take some adjustment, especially for a bike shop where work spans days or weeks and most jobs start as walk-ins. Right now, Square doesn’t have a true “service ticket → scheduled appointment → closed sale” workflow in the way Lightspeed does. This is valuable feedback and something we’d encourage you to submit as a feature request on our Square Community board, as it helps our product teams understand real-world workflows like yours.

In the meantime, we’re hoping another seller in the community, especially someone running a repair or service-based business, can jump in and share how they’re managing walk-in jobs that span multiple days or weeks using Square today. Thanks for raising this, and hopefully other users can offer some practical workarounds from their own experience. 

[homeprogreen]

I think the best approach would be a two pronged approach. You can create estimates in square to use instead of service tickets and then jump over to the Square appointments app to handle scheduling. With the new Square SuperPos functionality you can easily switch between the regular POS to the appointments app with a single click. Once the job is complete then you would convert the estimate into an invoice and collect payment 

[PerroneTech]

I run a service based business repairing computers, I also recently started selling e-bikes.

Unfortunately, Square doesn't provide the functionality you are looking for.

You will still need ticketing software. You can just use Square as a payment system.

In my case, I use Syncro MSP for ticketing tracking and then I use Zapier to push customer info to Square. It's still not where I want it to be for invoicing but I do need to go and see if new zaps have been released.

my workflow is currently:

customer walks in > intake form via Google Forms > zap creates new customer in Google Contacts > Zap creates new customer in Square > Zap creates new customer in Syncro > Zap create a new ticket in Syncro. I then take notes and track repair in Syncro. Once repair is done I checkout customer in Square and they are already there so no need to plug in their info.

Syncro has another product called Repairshopr. You can use that for your bike business. It's hard to find a free ticketing system that is good these days. Repairshopr used to have a free level, but no longer. I use Syncro because I offer residential MSP and it has the features I need.

I dream of the day Square integrates some sort of ticketing system.

Don't make the mistake I made of trying to dive into the KDS system, it is for kitchens and kitchens only and looking into/starting a trial marks you as a kitchen and you'll start to see options for kitchens in your settings that you can't get rid of.

I started selling e-bikes in August because of the popularity of them in my area, it is gaining momentum so I figured I'd sell them and service them since it falls under the umbrella of tech and I'm pretty handy. I decided to separate the two and created the e-bike business as its own brand. I've been looking at something where I could track inventory and repairs and maybe even rentals, and lightspeed was one of the options but I didn't dive into it. Doing a quick search shows light speed for retail being about $89/month. Repairshopr is a bit cheaper than that, not by much, and you could save a little bit more by paying annually. Perhaps give that a look?

Maybe someone who has a service ticket based business can chime in on how they run things entirely in Square, but this is my $0.02.