Today we’re sharing a new, easy-to-follow Mobile Repair guide built to help you continue to service your customers from a distance while providing excellent customer service that’s sure to wow them.

Using our video tutorial, you’ll be able to follow a step-by-step guide of how to set up your RepairShopr account to handle your very own Mobile Repair flow. This includes everything from having a lead complete a “mobile repair request” form on your website, to setting up an appointment to pick up the device from their house, to repairing the device and delivering it back to the customer without them ever having to come into your shop.

At the end of this guide, you will have:

1. Adjusted various settings and set up automations within RepairShopr to ensure this workflow is efficient and seamless for you and your team.
2. Embedded a customized form on your company website that allows leads to quickly and easily begin the device repair request process from anywhere.
3. Streamlined your mobile repair flow to enable maximum efficiency when handling pick-up and drop-off appointments, payment collection, and more.
4. Tested the entire flow from A to Z to make sure it’s working how you’d like before launch.

… all in under an hour.

Click here to learn how to set up your Mobile Repair Flow today

Happy Repairing,
The RepairShopr Team

The post Use Our New Mobile Repair Guide to Build More Revenue appeared first on Computer Repair Shop Software – CRM & Invoice System.

We’ve been working hard to help you adapt to the persisting economic challenges of our new social climate. We know that for the repair industry, a particular challenge has been the impact on retail, and we’ve been looking for creative ways to help you continue to serve your customers and even grow your business.

That’s why we’ve developed a new, easy-to-follow Mail-in Repair guide to help you continue to service your customers from a distance and even begin to access new customers that aren’t necessarily in your direct vicinity.

We’ve developed an in-depth video tutorial, along with a step-by-step slide deck that covers the same information. These detail out exactly how you can use RepairShopr to set up your very own Mail-in Repair flow in under one hour. At the end of this guide, you will have:

1. Adjusted various settings and set up new automations within RepairShopr to ensure this workflow is efficient and seamless for you and your team (Ticket Custom Fields, Email Templates, Ticket Automations, Custom Widgets, etc.).
2. Embedded a customized form on your company website that allows customers to quickly and easily begin the device repair request process from anywhere.
3. Used our new ShipStation or ShipRush integrations to seamlessly create a shipping order from a ticket and do things like automatically send customer information into the shipping platform to create a label and automate sending tracking information to your customers.
4. Tested the entire flow from A to Z to make sure it’s working how you’d like before launch.

… all in under an hour.

Click here to learn how to set up your Mail-in Repair Flow

– The RepairShopr Team

The post Expand Beyond Retail Boundaries by Using Mail-in Repair appeared first on Computer Repair Shop Software – CRM & Invoice System.

What does this mean for your repair business?

Depending on your circumstance and the characteristics of your business, you may be eligible to access economic relief from the new legislation.

Here are some helpful links to more comprehensive guides that can help you fully understand the programs and initiatives, and help you determine your eligibility:

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Guide to CARES Act: (this source is being updated regularly to reflect new developments):
https://www.uschamber.com/co/start/strategy/cares-act-small-business-guide

U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship Guide to CARES Act:
https://www.sbc.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/guide-to-the-cares-act

Here is a quick overview of the new programs & initiatives outlined in the legislation:

Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Loans
Cash-flow assistance through 100 percent federally guaranteed loans to employers who maintain their payroll during this emergency. If employers maintain their payroll, the loans would be forgiven, which would help workers remain employed, as well as help affected small businesses and our economy snap-back quicker after the crisis.

Small Business Debt Relief Program
This program will provide immediate relief to small businesses with non-disaster SBA loans, in particular 7(a), 504, and microloans. Under it, SBA will cover all loan payments on these SBA loans, including principal, interest, and fees, for six months.

Economic Injury Disaster Loans & Emergency Economic Injury Grants
These grants provide an emergency advance of up to $10,000 to small businesses and private non-profits harmed by COVID-19 within three days of applying for an SBA Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL).

Small Business Tax Provisions
This provision would provide a refundable payroll tax credit for 50 percent of wages paid by eligible employers to certain employees during the COVID-19 crisis.

Counseling & Training
If you, like many small business owners, need a business counselor to help guide you through this uncertain time, you can turn to your local Small Business Development Center (SBDC), Women’s Business Center (WBC), or SCORE mentorship chapter. These resource partners, and the associations that represent them, will receive additional funds to expand their reach and better support small business owners with counseling and up-to-date information regarding COVID-19.

Click here for the full text of the CARES Act:
https://sbecouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/FINAL-FINAL-CARES-ACT.pdf

The post How the CARES Act Can Help Your Repair Business appeared first on Computer Repair Shop Software – CRM & Invoice System.

We’ve noticed lots of people asking if their repair shop counts as an “Essential Business” and therefore can stay open to help customers adapt to Coronavirus. 

This varies based on country, state, city, etc. and it can be difficult to sift through all the information.

We decided to create a Google Spreadsheet where the repair Community as a whole can crowdsource that information!

Although we started the sheet, it’s really intended for anyone to utilize and add to in order to help repair shops all over the world figure out how this applies to their business. 

Please update and share it with anyone it can benefit! We hope it’s helpful.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Community “Essential Business” Resource (Repair Shops)

Stay safe,
The RepairShopr Team

The post Community Resource for Answering “Is my Repair Shop an Essential Business?” During Novel Coronavirus Shutdowns appeared first on Computer Repair Shop Software – CRM & Invoice System.

Hey RepairShoprs,

As you focus on maintaining the health and success of your business during this challenging time, you might be thinking of ways you can speed up processes to improve efficiency, adapt to changes your Customers are making, and keep providing the best support possible to your team and Customers.

While the RepairShopr team is focused on releasing new features and updates designed to help you cope with the changing environment of the Coronavirus, we wanted to highlight those features you could be utilizing within your account right now to maintain the health of your repair shop.

Check out the series of short videos below to learn what you can implement today!

CUSTOMER PORTAL

The Customer Portal is a page your Customers can go to in order to view their Tickets, Invoices, Estimates, and Attachments. They can open new Tickets, approve/deny Estimates, view Documentation, and even Payments! If you have a payment processor integrated, your Customers can pay specific Invoices through the Portal. This is especially useful right now when you might not be able to take payments in-person.

TICKET AUTOMATIONS

Ticket Automations enable you to streamline tons of custom workflows in order to reduce tasks and improve efficiency, while also helping your repair shop adapt to the changing Customer demands caused by the Coronavirus.

WEBSITE INTEGRATIONS AND CUSTOM WIDGETS

RepairShopr’s website integrations and customizable website widgets enable you to embed forms that your Customers can fill out when they need help.

SIMPLE WAYS TO ADD CHARGES TO TICKETS

While repair shops and their Customers are adjusting to the Coronavirus, we thought it would be helpful to review features that are helpful for billing Customers properly when going on-site, doing pickups and drop-offs, and other project work.

INTEGRATED PAYMENT PROCESSORS

RepairShopr integrates with different payment processors that enable you to easily bill your Customers. Customers can even pay their Invoices in the Customer Portal, and update their stored payment method. For Recurring Invoices, you can automatically charge Customers via their stored payment method. As Customers are working from home, this can save you a ton of time and help ensure that you get paid for your work.

We hope these features help make life a little easier while navigating the waters of this changing time.

– The RepairShopr Team

The post What you can Implement in RepairShopr to Adapt to Coronavirus appeared first on Computer Repair Shop Software – CRM & Invoice System.

At RepairShopr we don’t believe CloudPrint is for everyone, so we make it super simple and fast to access the PDF files of everything so you can print manually like every other software on the market – but for those of you that want the awesome automation – read on.

I believe there IS a configuration that is reliable enough that makes it totally worth it. I ran CloudPrint in my repair shop with this software internally for 2 years before opening it up to the public, so I had a lot of experience with troubleshooting before we even had other users on the software.

Why We Chose Cloud Print

This is a great section to start with, because a lot of frustrated users are like – “why are you using cloud print at all??”
Well, we are web based. Web based software can’t talk to your printers, so we could be like all of our competitors, and pop up a system print dialog – and you would have to choose the correct printer, adjust quantity, and print – every. single. time. 

Or..

Cloud Print is really the only option that exists to get a print job from a website to your printer without all those annoying clicks. We are constantly looking for other solutions – simply because we keep hearing from people that have the below issues – but there just isn’t anything else out there. 

If you do want to rid yourself of Cloud Print, you can just manually print all your print jobs – like you would have to do in any other web based software out there, we make the PDF files super easy to get to also!

Hard Rules

1. The printers will be just as reliable if they are USB or Network printers (on the cloud print side that is, of course if you don’t setup your network printers properly – you have other issues..)
2. You should not do the configuration from a computer that will be having Chrome closed, or logged out of (logging out of chrome stops the printing!)
3. If printing stops working, don’t panic – troubleshoot asap because it’s probably going to print a huge backlog when you do fix it
4. When you configure this, you do it on one computer – never multiple (multi-location accounts, it’s one computer per location)

Ok – so let’s get started with setting it up..

For this configuration, it could make sense to run chrome/cloudprint on the point of sale computer because it probably has access to the most printers, ie, receipt printer, label printer, and the main copier for the shop are probably all used frequently here. 

Go ahead and do it. The only thing to make 100% certain is your staff and employees are not logging in and out of Google accounts. Log out of everything, log in as the account you want to hook to cloud print, and tell everyone they cannot log out of that google account.

Now – once it’s working, take it a step further and install https://tools.google.com/dlpage/cloudprintservice . This will give you a Windows service that runs in the background and is a little more reliable than Chrome.

Variation for stability

Maybe you find it’s too difficult to do this on your point of sale computer, or you have some other need for that machine – go buy a $200 desktop that can sit somewhere in your shop covered in red tape and it does nothing else. Have it configured so you can RDP to it easily from any machine. The moment you notice a printing issue, RDP into it and address it. Not having people using Chrome, logging in and out of things, etc will make it much more reliable.

Troubleshooting the right way

We talk about this in our KB, but it’s hard to really grasp. I’ll try to explain it another way here..

When you setup cloud print, your Chrome browser makes a link between your windows printers and the google cloud. So now a file can come into google and get sent to your printer. 

• Google maintains a print queue
• Google maintains a list of your physical printers – which they connect to through the internet and your Chrome browser

Something that will happen from time to time is printing will just “stop working”. This is the nature of the internet, the type of authentication that’s happening, and a service that isn’t one of their most important.

At this point, especially if you have multiple stores, the absolute wrong things to do are:

1. Ignore it for a day or two – you’ll have hundreds of jobs in the queue and it’s not easy to bulk cancel them – they all need to print
2. Go into chrome and delete printers and re-add – this is a super last-resort and probably never needs to happen once things are working properly

So, printing stops working one day – you notice it pretty fast, and are ready to figure out what’s up – here we go

First – head to https://google.com/cloudprint from Chrome on the computer that was initially configured and has the printers hooked up. If it doesn’t take you straight into your cloud print control panel, like it asks you to login, switch users, etc – that was your problem.

If you get logged in and there is nothing in the queue, there’s a chance it was a RepairShopr issue. It’s happened a couple times in the last couple years.. We can get backed up, or your printing configuration can get changed by another user accidentally, etc etc. Just look into your account Printer configuration in RS if that’s the case. (nothing getting queued up)

If you get right to the control panel, and see queued up jobs – look at the printers, do they say disconnected? If this happens once in a while, like once every couple months – try rebooting the computer and logging back into Chrome, visiting the control panel – and see if the print jobs start coming out. If they don’t – there is a very high chance something silly happened like someone changed the USB port the printer is on. (which causes Windows to make a “copy 1” printer, and now cloudprint needs to be told about a whole new printer.)

I did have to reboot my cloudprint server machine every couple months for this symptom – it’s no big deal for the pay off of having printing automation.

Lets go back to this issue, someone changes the USB port the printer is on. You should be able to see the “copy 1” printer in cloudprint, and you should be able to have RepairShopr resync your printers and be good to go. Take a screenshot of your Printers page in RS, because those settings will be gone when you resync your printers. Once that happens, reconfigure the correct printers and you are good to go.

Especially if you have multiple stores, this is the right way to do this because you don’t want to do anything more drastic to that google account and throw off all your other locations. Doing this essentially adds a new printer to cloudprint, and refreshes your RS settings – but the connections to those other locations printers should still be fine through this.

There are delays..

We here about this all the time, in all of our testing there is basically always a 6 second delay. That’s what it takes for a PDF to get from our server, to google cloud, to their queue, to your Chrome browser, and into your printer to get processed. Yes it’s annoying, and no, it’s not THAT bad. If you have delays longer than this you probably have a very bad internet connection (56k modem?) or a computer/printer problem. We setup tons of shops like this and we constantly see a steady 5-6 second delay. Sure 1 out of 100 will be slower… This is pretty much a steady rule though. (Would you rather open printer dialogs and choose printers, or sit there smiling at a customer for an extra 2 seconds?)

TL;DR – Get a printer server windows machine for $200 at each of your stores, if printing stops working troubleshoot accurately and swiftly, cloudprint will make you very happy.

The post Cloud Print – How to setup printers for little trouble appeared first on Computer Repair Shop Software – CRM & Invoice System.

This article is really aimed at giving a concrete example of a managed service, and to explain why it’s better for everyone (you and your customers) while also being more profitable for you. Please suspend all disbelief, and set aside anything you’ve heard about managed services until the end.

In my mind a good definition of managed services is;

using tooling to automate simple tasks that are part of productizing your already valuable services into stable recurring reveneue that allows you to bill more while spending less time while also providing a “next-level” service to your customer.

So let’s dig in to some details on:

• Why backups are a good place to start
• How this can turn into recurring revenue
• The services we think make sense to be your first bundle
• Example pricing
• Tooling deep dive

Why do we care about backups?

I am just going to assume you already believe backups are important, and you’ve seen individuals and businesses lose important data before – so you know first hand how important it is.

Backups are still hard. If you want local copies, and online copies, and some level of confidence the backups are happening across multiple workstations and maybe also a file share – this isn’t the type of thing a non-tech can generally get setup. (Not in a way that can be fully trusted/monitored) I know this because in my years of being a computer repair guy, and even growing into being an MSP and supporting some pretty big businesses(for me that was 300~ employees, 20 servers~), it was still really hard for me to get backups to a point where I trusted them without having to check on them constantly.

This is also an easy sell to your customers because they do care about their data. Individuals want to know their family photos will be around forever. Business owners want to feel like they are taking necessary steps to protect their business from data loss, everyone already agrees that they want to invest *something* in backups.

What is out there?

We’ll just set aside tools like Dropbox/Google Drive, they are terrific, and if your users are really good about putting everything in there, backups might not be relevent to those folks. This article is for the masses of people that don’t fully get it, the people that can’t tell if a file is in Dropbox or in their Documents folder. Most of the time even if a business has a few people using Dropbox properly, there are still a handful of people that don’t know how, or think they do but still have files not being backed up.(or maybe regulated to not using these due to HIPAA/etc) You know who they are…

There are TONS of solutions out there, lots of ways to do this. If you have looked around a bit you’ve probably run into Carbonite, Mozy, idrive, ibackup, and many more. Maybe also free tools like cobian, or custom scripts – and business tools like storage craft and backup exec. Many of these tools do a great job, and you could accomplish the same level of confidence using these tools.

For my purposes they are lacking in the business model department.

If you are a traditional break-fix shop, or consultant, you probably use these tools already – and you probably do good backups for your customers. Let’s talk about a way to combine in some more services without you having to “do more work” so you are stepping the service up a notch, and rightfully charging a little bit more.

How do you make money

Affiliate Model

When it comes to the affiliate model the best I’ve seen so far is idrive and ibackup(business version). You signup as an affiliate and you get 25% of the revenue forever. (Thanks Chuck for telling me about this)

The consumer version has a free 5GB tier too, so you can install it and if they cross that 5GB mark and they sign up, you start making money at that point.

If you read this article and feel like it’s “just too much work” to go the managed backup route, fear not, it makes a lot of sense to just become an affiliate of idrive/ibackup and start making *some* money now. You will start making recurring revenue and we’ll be glad we could point you in that direction.

However, for the ambitious, if you want to move your pricing up a few notches, and move your margin from 25% to 93%, read on for how to run a truly profitable backup operation.

Managed Backup Service

Transitioning to “Managed Services” is a huge step in future-proofing your business and making you more profitable. It’s essentially about taking a basic break-fix business and packaging the services into broader packages to “productize your services”.

What is your most profitable area of your business? Service.

Let me give you a couple examples. How much is your hourly rate? $70/hr – $120/hr? Ok – let’s say you have a small business client that is an average user, maybe a small real estate brokerage office with 5 agents. These clients are everywhere – just think to yourself, if I asked so-and-so to put a doc in a Dropbox folder and share it to me, and they would struggle with that, they could be a potential managed backup customer.

Let’s say in this example that most agents do use DropBox properly for their personal docs, but a few of them also keep personal family photos outside of DropBox, and there is a network share that only backs up to a USB hard drive in the office that has most of the important work files.

In addition to that, 2 of the users also use QuickBooks desktop and they backup to a folder on their desktop, and “are supposed to” copy the backup file to the network share after each backup.

For the sake of the illustration, lets say this network share is about 150GB, and each user has about 15GB on their computer that isn’t in DropBox.

Now let’s say they get a cryptolocker virus, or the network share drive fails, or all the things you know can happen – something comes up and some files are lost.

“But we had good backups” – no, they had the bare minimum and it almost never works to do the bare minimum in backups. In backups, they have to be 110% or they are worthless. The rule of backups is, if it’s possible one file isn’t being backed up, it’s the most important file and you will lose it.

So now this client wants total peace of mind going forward, so they ask you to verify their backups are working every week. That means you remote into their office computers, or go visit them weekly – and verify the QB files are a reasonable size, and in the right place, and the USB backups are working, and maybe check that carbonite or whatever has recent backups of the USB drive. This might take you 30-90 minutes per week.

Imagine you were going to offer that as a service, what would you charge? (2-6hrs/month + travel)

$400/month?
$200/month?

That is valuable isn’t it? That client will now be 110% confident that their backups are PERFECT. Because you are good at checking, and you are doing it every week.

Productize It

Now – what if a combination of tooling and productizing could bundle this into an automated service, the price would be between the bare minimum from above, and your full billable rate, and almost the exact same benefits!

A combination of CloudBerry Managed Backups(the backups) and RepairShopr(the billing system): We provide tooling that charges them whatever you want – and it takes almost none of your time. Now you can scale your business. You are providing the FULL value, with almost none of the time spent. You can properly leverage your skills and provide more value to more customers. This is what managed services is about, and you can do the same thought exercise for your regular break-fix work for business customers.

This is your first managed service, combining great backups with your service to monitor and verify, and jump in when things aren’t working.

Think: Antivirus, Patches, Server updates/reboots, software updates (java/flash/etc), defrags, monitor windows event log for disk errors(drives about to fail).

An Example Managed Backup Product

Business Managed Backups

You provide world class endpoint backup software, you monitor it to make sure the backups haven’t stopped running, you monitor the backup space used to make sure their 150GB network share hasn’t just backed up 1GB after a year of running, maybe you also spot check monthly or so to double-check a list of critical files and read an error log. You automatically get a trouble ticket in RepairShopr when a backup hasn’t run for X number of days, and you contact the client and go take care of it for them for no extra charge.

The backups are fully encrypted, and the restore speed is unmatched. With CloudBerry restoring from Glacier/S3, you are going to be able to restore the entire backup same day. *Keep in mind Glacier has high costs for restoring, so check out our pricing calculator to see how that should be priced – or just use S3 (simpler formula for profit margin).

We’ve seen small businesses with 150/GB perfectly happy to pay $150/month for this type of peace of mind. $1/GB for storage sounds like a lot for “storage” – and yes, it would be, but this isn’t storage pricing, this is “Managed Backup Service Package” pricing. It happens to be per GB because that is the fair model for everyone. The client doesn’t want to pay for 1TB of backups and only use 150GB, that is wasteful, and everyone hates their cell phone plan where they get 500 minutes and then start paying hundreds of dollars for overages. (staying with the analogy – yeah, unlimited talk is better, you could easily do that here as well.)

Don’t let the pricing discussion go to price per GB as a way to compare, remember, you are bundling all those services that the other solutions are not.

Welcome to the future, and welcome to becoming an MSP.

Automated billing

With CloudBerry managed backup service your clients computers will be sending stats to the CloudBerry cloud so you can see how much they are storing, when it last ran, and if any errors occurred.

Now we will sync with them so we can map your CloudBerry ‘user’ (customers) to your RepairShopr Customers, and now we can do the billing. You can create a new type of recurring invoice that is CloudBerry-aware, and you can even choose between tiered or metered pricing for your customers.

We support both models of pricing, tiered and metered. You can have a plan that is $300/mo for unlimited, or whatever you feel works for your client. I prefer the metered model personally, you charge per GB and as they backup more, you automatically make more and more money each month.

The key to selling this is that you are monitoring the success/fail of their backups, and if anything happens to make the backups stop running, you get alerted and you’ll take care of it at no extra charge. This is how you sell peace of mind.

CloudBerry Tooling

CloudBerry has a full suite of backup tooling. Their products can backup locally or to the cloud. They allow you to use many online storage accounts like; Amazon S3/Glacier, Google Drive, Azure Cloud, etc. They have products for servers, VM’s, bare metal restore, SQL, Exchange, all the tools you would expect a mature backup software company to provide.

Goals

It’s a primary goal of us here at RepairShopr to help make your business better. We aren’t just building useful software – we want to help educate and also help you bring yourself to market. We try to help with marketing by building out the Marketr feature, and a Mailchimp integration. We find special pricing and good integrations that help make your business better.

The post Managed Online Backups: Stabilize your business by creating recurring revenue appeared first on Computer Repair Shop Software – CRM & Invoice System.

Many people requested this over the last year and we didn’t think we had a good foundation to implement it in a graceful way, well – that time has come!

You can enable the feature, add Deposit items to your Inventory – and start collecting those with ease.

There is a Take Deposit button on the ticket, that with just a click creates an invoice and triggers a credit to show up on the following invoice you make for that customer.

Here is a screenshot tour;

1. Click the new Take Deposit button

2. The first time you’ll need to create an Inventory item like so;

3. Then that Take Deposit button will ask you to select which Deposit amount/name you want to charge them;

4. Accept the money, then you’ll see on the Ticket – Charges a pending credit for the deposit amount

5. Next time you make an invoice from this Ticket, that Deposit credit will automatically show as a line item – just as expected

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