Repair shop management software

[unimatrix93]

Hello everyone,

What software do you guys recommend me to manage my repair projects and customers?


Is there any free or opensource solution or I should stick to using Excel until I can invest into a proper software?

Thank you!

[piernov]

I don't know of open-source solutions dedicated to repair shops. More general ERP/CRM solutions include Odoo and Dolibarr, the former often requiring a lot of custom configurations and often custom development that some companies can do, the latter being a bit less complex but not mature enough for larger operations and still not very user-friendly. There are several third-party modules for "repair" for Odoo but I don't know what they can do
As for commercial software, I've heard several times people being very dissatisfied with the subscription-based online solutions due to vendor lock-in and poor support, i.e., they hold all your data and migrating to other solutions becomes a nightmare, and they do not answer your support requests. Typical situation with "software-as-a-service" so I would recommending staying away from that whenever possible.
Financing a setup and custom development for Odoo may make sense if you have big enough revenue, otherwise it'd probably be a good idea for several repair shops to financially participate in the development of a custom solution.

[unimatrix93]

I don't know of open-source solutions dedicated to repair shops. More general ERP/CRM solutions include Odoo and Dolibarr, the former often requiring a lot of custom configurations and often custom development that some companies can do, the latter being a bit less complex but not mature enough for larger operations and still not very user-friendly. There are several third-party modules for "repair" for Odoo but I don't know what they can do
As for commercial software, I've heard several times people being very dissatisfied with the subscription-based online solutions due to vendor lock-in and poor support, i.e., they hold all your data and migrating to other solutions becomes a nightmare, and they do not answer your support requests. Typical situation with "software-as-a-service" so I would recommending staying away from that whenever possible.
Financing a setup and custom development for Odoo may make sense if you have big enough revenue, otherwise it'd probably be a good idea for several repair shops to financially participate in the development of a custom solution.

That was what I thinking too. A selfhosted solution that I can run on my homeserver would be the best solution. There is an ongoing github project called Reparo. I keep my eyes on it once it get released, because it looks promising.

[Topcat]

PC Repair Tracker. Used it for years.....but I don't think it's maintained anymore....last update was 2020.

https://pcrepairtracker.com/page/

[Whale linguini]

That was what I thinking too. A selfhosted solution that I can run on my homeserver would be the best solution. There is an ongoing github project called Reparo. I keep my eyes on it once it get released, because it looks promising.

That looks pretty cool. I have been looking for something super basic and lightweight like that. I'm not interesting in a whole online/cloud what have you. And while odoo is great and all, it's quite overkill for what I am trying to do now. I did try to 'slim' it up some by making a portable wrapper for it, while that works and all... not sure if I have the motivation to do the setup on the repair parts. It is decently not super painful to make something like that, I'm just debating how much I want to deal with 14gb of crap when I'm making 100kb changes. Just a lot of overhead. You can find my portable builder script on github.